Charter/Spectrum surprise

[Markverhyden]

Anyone have a surprise this morning? Everything was hunky dory when I went to bed around 9:30pm. Up at 4am'ish this morning. My laptop I leave at home has both wifi and wired running. Wake it up and got the below. But what's odd is the popup window is from the UniFi AP. Got home a little while ago and checked the DNS, it's fine. Power cycled everything and it still pops up when I turn on WiFi. I can close the window and all works. Well, almost all. My land lady lives below me. Her seriously disabled brother moved in not long ago and, since she has no Internet, I agreed to let them use my WiFi for Roku for the TV in his room. Of course this is happening when I have no free time to troubleshoot. So just wondering if any others using them as an ISP has had anything odd happening? TIA.

 

[Mike McCall]

Do you get the same thing on a different device?

 

[Diggs]

Nothing here. No issues although I use a residential not business connection and I don't use Spectrum DNS.

 

[mikeroq]

Probably just a glitch with the Unifi. Thinking your network had a sign in page when Spectrum forced that page to your devices.

 

[Mike McCall]

The reason I ask about a different device is this appears only when connecting via WIFI. It seems unlikely Spectrum would discern an internal WIFI connection and show this page, but not for a wired connection. After-all, it's talking about DNS changes which would affect both types. Also, the likelihood Spectrum would have the ability to change a sign-in page which is internal to the AP is very unlikely at best.

If it doesn't show up on a different machine/phone on the same WIFI connection, then it seems likely there's something on the original machine triggering this when it detects a WIFI connection.

 

[mikeroq]

When Mac OS connects to a wifi network it probes http://captive.apple.com/hotspot-detect.html for a success response. Also http://captive.apple.com also returns success. (Windows does this too by probing http://www.msftncsi.com/ncsi.txt)

If success is not received it's assumed that it was redirected to a captive portal. Thus the captive portal popup is launched showing whatever the portal page is.

So Spectrum like other ISPs like to hijack your browser to display messages. For instance the only time this happens with my ISP is when I'm behind on payment.

It looks like the Mac is not getting success form captive.apple.com on the wifi though the UniFI AP.

Try browsing to http://captive.apple.com on that mac when on the wifi. Try it wired as well. You might find on wired it might not return success. Since that popup

 

[Mike McCall]

It looks like the Mac is not getting success form captive.apple.com on the wifi though the UniFI AP.

Except for:

I can close the window and all works.

You may be right. I'm just suspicious of something local to the machine rather than external to it. An inability to connect should trigger a system notification of some sort rather than this page. Marks' ability to close it and keep going, as well as his wired connection not triggering it suggests something local.

 

[mikeroq]

Marks' ability to close it and keep going

I'll use this as an example. With my ISP if you swap your modem or are setting up a new service when you first connect it directs you to a site called walledgarden.prv. Or for instance ATT. When your modem is having a problem, say you go to "google.com" your address bar will say google.com but you get the ATT modem page saying you have some kind of problem.

So when he first connected to wifi, the OS probed captive.apple.com but it was hijacked by Spectrum showing this DNS change support page. So now his Mac thinks captive.apple.com is on spectrum's server.

wired connection not triggering it suggests something local.

The probe to captive.apple.com is only made when you connect to a wifi network. Since wired networks don't typically have a captive portal. So connecting wired would bypass that check and thus no popup.

Since he mentioned no other devices doing this I would assume it's local to the laptop. Hence why he should manually browse to captive.apple.com on the wired connection and see what comes up.

 

[Mike McCall]

You may well be absolutely right, @mikeroq. I don't recall running into that particular issue. I'm interested in hearing what Mark comes up with.

 

[mikeroq]

Yes how dare Mark leave us in suspense here!!!

 

[Markverhyden]

Yes how dare Mark leave us in suspense here!!!

I'm sure none of you all were holding your breath! LOL!!!

Thanks for all the replies. As @mikeroq mentioned it was a captive portal type response. But I don't have a captive portal setup, not even broadcasting the SSID. Everything was updated and rebooted yesterday as well.

I didn't have time to try it on another computer. But I could see, on the controller, my iPhone connected and other things connected. As I mentioned above, the Roku TV downstairs wasn't working either, networking errors.. Joined the network again, got an IP, but still fails. When I did troubleshooting in Netflix 2 of the 4 tests failed. Checked again first thing on my laptop. Still getting the popup.

So I get home a little while ago, ready to do battle and slay this dragon. Or maybe just call up Charter and be a real squeaky wheel. Just as suddenly it appeared, it's disappeared. Rebooted same laptop again, all looks good.

I can only think it's something wanky going on between the Apple captive portal, UniFi and Charter DNS, which are on the list of DNS servers. Spent a few minutes looking around on the Internet as well, nothing of consequence.

 

[Fred Claus]

Anyone have a surprise this morning? Everything was hunky dory when I went to bed around 9:30pm. Up at 4am'ish this morning. My laptop I leave at home has both wifi and wired running. Wake it up and got the below. But what's odd is the popup window is from the UniFi AP. Got home a little while ago and checked the DNS, it's fine. Power cycled everything and it still pops up when I turn on WiFi. I can close the window and all works. Well, almost all. My land lady lives below me. Her seriously disabled brother moved in not long ago and, since she has no Internet, I agreed to let them use my WiFi for Roku for the TV in his room. Of course this is happening when I have no free time to troubleshoot. So just wondering if any others using them as an ISP has had anything odd happening? TIA.

View attachment 11225

Might this have something to do with the firmware update that interrupted third part VOIP services as well?