Connecting a WiFI notecard via a captive portal

Notecard API
1

Hello all,
I have a device working fine outdoors with a cellular Notecard. But now I’m working with the same device inside a school building that has non-existent cellular reception. I have a WiFI Notecard and I just got permission and credentials from the school IT folks to allow me to connect to their WiFI network, but their process involves logging in via a captive portal sign-in screen on a browser.

I’ve searched the Blues documents and forum for any guidance about how to handle a situation like that, but found nothing. I do see some more general recommendations out there about spoofing MAC addresses with a Mac/PC and then doing a sort of hand-off between devices, but that seems a bit sketchy. So I’m checking in here to see if anyone has experience using the WIFI notecard in such a scenario and to solicit some guidance and/or referral to any relevant documentation.

thanks!
…Norm…

2

Hi @noforan,

Unfortunately the Notecard WiFi is unable to connect via a captive portal, only by specifying the AP/password.

Rob

3

Thanks Rob. I think I may try this other method that I read about (somehow swapping MAC addresses with a PC) and if I do, I’ll update this post with the result.

4

Hello again @RobLauer – a follow-up on this thread:

The IT folks were able to provide a dedicated AP that doesn’t require interaction with a captive portal and the WIFI Notecard is connected. However, they would like to restrict the traffic going out of their network so it only routes to the Notehub IP range.

I see some documentation that talks about whitelisting Notehub server IPs when sending traffic from Notehub – but not the IP address needed if you wanted to whitelist an IP address to route data to Notehub.

Is there an IP or range that can be whitelisted in the originating WIFI network to send data to Notehub, or is there another method?

thanks!

5

Hi @noforan,

As of today, the Notecard WiFi connects to our public handlers at our documented IP range. However, they also need to issue “discovery requests” (e.g. to i.notefile.net) and those come through AWS’s public IP range. These are managed by AWS and could change at any time in theory. However, they are also published by AWS and can be accessed with either of the following commands:

curl -s https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json | jq '.prefixes[] | select(.service=="AMAZON" and .region=="us-east-1")'
curl -s https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json | jq -r '.prefixes[] | select(.service=="AMAZON" and .region=="us-east-1") | .ip_prefix'

In the future we hope to provide a list of static IPs.

Rob

6

Thank you Rob! I have forwarded that info to the school’s IT support and am waiting to see their response.