Force login page on unsecured wifi network.

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Force login page on unsecured wifi network.

I am staying in a hotel for an extended period of time. I was able to connect to the unsecured wifi on my first day, but have been unable to connect since. There is no password. When I connect on my iPhone and iPad, a browser window pops up to ask me to click "accept" to their terms and conditions. Once I click "accept," I am connected and can browse freely.

I am unable to get the browser window to pop up on my MacBook Pro. I have cleared all cache, cookies, and browsing history, I have tried forgetting the network entirely, I have tried restarting and a hard shutdown of my computer, I have tried typing the network address into my browser window, and I have tried forgetting the network and turning off wifi on both my iPhone and iPad. Nothing works.

I have confirmed this is not a hardware problem - I have no trouble connecting to my Verizon mobile hotspot, nor any other networks when I leave the hotel.

Please help!

MacBook Pro, iOS 11.2.5

Posted on Feb 18, 2018 1:15 PM

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Answer 1

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wyomato Author

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Feb 19, 2018 7:55 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

No, I did this:

Turn off wifi
Open a terminal and enter:
```
ifconfig
```
It will list your interfaces include something along these lines:

en0: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,SMART,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 ether d2:00:3d:71:51:05 ...

The six pairs of hex digits separated by colon are the MAC address. en0 is usually the primary network interface and your wifi. Tweak the last digit (e.g. by adding one to it as I have below) and enter this line into terminal to soft change the MAC address (it will prompt for your login/admin password):

sudo ifconfig en0 lladdr d2:00:3d:71:51:06

Then turn wifi back on and connect to the hotel wifi. It should bring up the login prompt as if you are a new user.

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Answer 2

Feb 18, 2018 7:00 PM in response to wyomato

So if I am understanding you,

You removed the existing (but not working) network from this pane:

... then did a Restart, and

then you were able to proceed, enter today's password or fill in today's login page and proceed?

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Answer 3

Feb 18, 2018 1:49 PM in response to wyomato

in general, you have to try to get on the internet, like trying to surf to Apple.com. Then that page gets intercepted, and you get the login page instead.

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Answer 4

wyomato Author

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Feb 18, 2018 4:57 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

I've tried navigating to a variety of pages, and no luck. I kept going this afternoon and found the following fix:

macos - Forcing the wifi password entry dialogue to display - Ask Different

That worked, but only after I restarted.

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Answer 5

Feb 19, 2018 8:14 AM in response to wyomato

Hmmmm, you should never have to change the MAC address of a device. I suspect something else is going on. All I can think of is that for some reason your MAC address was blocked by the establishment.

Glad it worked for you though.

For others coming by this thread a MAC address is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_address

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Answer 6

wyomato Author

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Feb 19, 2018 9:29 AM in response to BobTheFisherman

Interesting you should say that, BobTheFisherman. I did one other thing that may have worked, although I did it in tandem with the fix above.

I turned off Keychain on all of my devices. That way, none of them was sharing wifi network information.

No way of knowing which trick fixed the problem, I'm just glad it worked. 🙂

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Force login page on unsecured wifi network.

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