[lug] Google Chrome, iptables, and a captive portal

[Dan Ferris]

Here's an interesting one for you guys...

I have a captive portal I've slapped together with iptables, apache, and 
python.  When you access the Internet with your browser, iptables will 
NAT your connection to the local Apache server that displays the login 
page.  The captive portal script captures the URL you are trying to 
access and then redirects you to it after sign on.

At least, that's the idea.

Now, the interesting part is that the captive portal works great.  Every 
browser except Chrome works exactly as expected.  You log into the 
captive portal, it checks your username / password, adds the necessary 
iptables rules to let you through the portal, kills off old iptables 
states with conntrack and the redirects you to the original page.

Instead of just working like every other browser, Chrome will hang when 
the captive portal script redirects you to the original page.  The only 
way to make it work is to close Chrome and relaunch it as which point it 
will browse until the login expires.

If anyone has any good ideas, I'm open to suggestions...

Dan