Dec 14, '07 03:30:00PM • Contributed by: gshenaut
In trying to use our Macbook (with Leopard) wirelessly at the local University library, we encountered a problem. They have a captive portal such that the connection to the wireless system has no password, but you must authenticate via your web browser. The Macbook connected to the wifi system, or at least it claimed it did, but no actual connection was established, and of course, the captive portal was never activated. After some trial and error with the university's IT people (who told me that they had seen this same problem with a few Leopard Macbooks and Macbook Pros, but never with Tiger or with non-Macs), we figured out a workaround.
What you do is create another Location (we called ours "Kludge"), and leave it at the default settings. With that location selected, the airport worked flawlessly, the captive portal activated, and everything was wonderful again.
My suspicion is that the Automatic location can get munged somehow, possibly if third-party network devices are installed. We had installed a Novatel CDMA modem on that machine in the Automatic location. Anyway, once Automatic gets broken, then it could fail in subtle ways such as what I described. Setting up a new location gives the system a tabular rasa to work with, and in this case, it was sufficient to solve the problem.
