This post is about how to debug an UniFi captive portal issue. The process includes testing connectivity, looking at the controller, and at times rebooting the APs.

Unfortunately, this can be a frustrating problem to solve, especially when it happens to a high-value Guest who really wants the internet!

It's almost always the Guest Device!

The device Guest is using to connect the network is to blame in most cases. It's the device that, when connecting to a WiFi network tries to check if it can access the internet. If it can't popups a browser/application that loads the splash page.

However, this process of internet detection is not reliable and fails at times. When it fails, the device won't have internet access neither would it pop up the captive portal.

Follow the below steps to debug the root cause of this. Go to the next step only if the previous one fails.

Step1: Visit a non-HTTPS site on the Guest device

Open up the browser on the guest device and visit http://neverssl.com/ this should force your device to open up the splash page.

Step2: Remove Network Profile From device and reconnect

Forget the wireless network from your device and connect again. This would help if the issue was caused by the guest's device not being able to detect the Guest wifi.

How to forget a wireless network in iOS/MAC

How to forget a network in android

Step3: Check the DNS and walled garden

If you reach here, you might want to have a laptop or MacBook to debug the issue a bit more deeply.

Open up a terminal on the Guest device and try to ping app.spotipo.com



If the domain can't be resolved, then there could be some issue with DNS on your network, or could be that another firewall is blocking DNS packets.

If you are able to resolve the domain, but the ping fails. Please check the Guest Policy settings.

Step4: Check the Guest Policy settings

Login to your UniFi controller and navigate to Guest policy in the legacy UI.



Here check that

The external portal server address is selected

Custom Portal IPv4 address is correct

Pre-Authorization access has the IP of our load balancer

Step 5: Check Networks

Navigate to the Networks tab, if you had a dedicated VLAN setup for the Hotspot, it should be of type 'Corporate' not 'Guest'. Guest networks are for enabling portals on wired connections

Step 6: Restart the AP and controller

As the last step, please try to restart the Access Points and Unifi controller. It could be that either of those is having issues and not able to redirect Guests properly.

Step 7: Contact Support

If none of the above steps helps, please contact spotipo support. Either via the chat wizard or by sending an email to support [at] spotipo [dot] com

Updated on: 21/02/2025