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Forum Discussion
Captive Portal causing Dropout
Hello,
Generally, I am very happy with the RBR20... that said, I have discovered a problem with the system and I don't know how to resolve it. The Guest Network is currently disabled (though it was enabled at one point). When any configuration change happens to the router, one or more devices (and especially those that are connected over VPN) suddenly drop connection. On laptops with a VPN a message stating that a captive portal has been detected will appear. Often one of the Sattelites will disconnect from the make router and any devices connected to it will not have internet anymore.
The captive portal address is orbilogin.net.
What I believe is happening is that devices that connect to the router, when they request *any* IP address, are being asked to login to the router. It also happens occasionally when no change has been made to the orbi config. I have roughly 30 or more devices connected to the internet.. sometimes they all work, and sometimes they suddenly lose connection and require reboot. Restarting sattelites fixes their connection issues.. restarting the Orbi main router often stops the issue from happening. Occasionally I need to restart individual devices to make them reconnect.
Question:
Am I the only one experiencing this? Has anyone figured out how to make it stop happening?
Should I switch to a different platform to get a solid and reliable connection?
Regards,
Tim
4 Replies
It does seem that a number of configuration changes cause the Orbi router to go through a lengthy process of restarting things (although what things is not clear to me and other configuration changes do not have the same effect). For example, turning Guest WiFi on or off seems to result in that spinning circle while forwarding a port does not. No doubt the engineers thought "to be safe", we need to restart some activities in certain circumstances.
It is not surprising that a VPN connection would get disrupted. It would be interesting to see a screen shot of that message (with any personal information erased). If maintaining that VPN connection is critical, I would not mess with the router unless I am unable to restart the VPN session.
The other issues are most likely not related to 'orbilogin.com' and devices are not being asked to log in to the Orbi router.
Is there a way to prove it? Because so far what I can see in the admin console are that the sattelites are connected and the connection quality is good. But, I can proveably show that turning off the malfunctioning sattelite allows devices that were connected to it, to connect to another node and connect to the internet.
Regarding the captive portal, I don't have one configured that I know of. However, even on computers that don't have a VPN, when they have this issues and I try to connect to say google.com to search up a speed test (an example I have tried)... google will report that the certificate cannot be validated and that it appears someone is trying to intercept the connection. Looking at the certificate shows orbilogin.net as the certificate domain.
Unfortunately, I don't have pictures of it right now. But, I am hoping someone else has experienced it and disabled the orbilogin.net captive portal somehow.
Since I can show that it is happening on my computers (and also that it happened on a firestick when I loaded the web browser) I am reasonably confident that the connection problems are due to the captive portal and disabling it will resolve my issues.
Part of the confusion is my fault. I had just discussed Orbi's implementation of OpenVPN with someone and made an incorrect assumption that your VPN was a remote laptop connecting to the Orbi LAN over OpenVPN. I see now that VPN refers to a laptop connected to the LAN using VPN to connect to the internet.
On the topic of captive portal, this is a true mystery. The term is often referring to how WiFi access is granted at hotels, coffee shops, airports, etc.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captive_portal This is not something that can be enabled (or disabled) on an Orbi WiFi.
The issue with orbilogin.net has existed for more than two years. A long time ago, Netgear purchased SSL certificates for a bunch of URL's (routerlogin.com, routerlogin.net, orbilogin.com, orbilogin.net and maybe a couple more). In August of 2019, that SSL certificate expired and was not renewed. Nobody knows if (a) Netgear did not renew the certificate because somebody forgot or the person who should have was out on Covid, or (b) the certificate authority decided that having thousands of routers all over the world claiming to be "Netgear" was absurd. Anyway, later in 2019 Netgear put a self-signed certificate in their router firmware. Modern browsers go bezerk when they see a self-signed certificate WARNING - - UNSAFE. All of my browsers do that, so I look in the small print for the option to "go there anyway", and the browser remembers from then on that I know what I'm doing.
Honestly, I cannot remember how people solved this problem in the past. Perhaps they did a Factory Reset on their Orbi and reconfigured it.
Sorry to have made a hash of this.
