Hello Laurent,

In the SOTI Surf configurations, is 'Enable Home Screen' enabled by any chance?

Regards,

Hi,

No it is not.

The only active options are Fullscreen mode, and status bar removal.

For testing purposes we authorized soti.net on the firewall, and what happens is that the soti sync page is displayed, the same as the one present at the top of the page of this forum

I also noticed this started happening on the production devices which still have the older soti surf version (14.2)

I have seriously no clue how this is even possible, nothing changed on the production devices.

Any help would be appreciated, this is a serious issue.

Hi Laurent,

Surf tries to access soti.net to determine whether the device has an internet connection. Based on this result, it tries to load the Captive Portal page. I am unsure how it was bypassing this in 14.2, but allowing www.soti.net through the firewall would be one way around this.

I will check to see if there is anything that can be done to bypass this process.

Regards,

This is xhat we get, as a new page opening on top of the one that's supposed to be opened.

If we close it with the cross on the top, we have our intended website behind. Seems like some sort of popup.

Not to mention, this worked for over 6 months, with the same firewall policy, and no change to soti surf settings or version.

I'm lost.

I found something interesting.

This behavior only happens when on Cellular network.

If I switch to wifi, it works, as soon as I switch to cellular, no matter what website I'm trying to access, be it from the kiosk itself or from a soti surf menu link, it opens www.soti.net

I have no network restriction configured on soti surf (wifi, cellular and roaming are checked).

The thing is we use private APNs to access the local network from 4G.

Then I tried to use my personal sim, and guess what, with my personal sim, no soti.net opening either.

So this seems related to this particular cellular network, with maybe some routing triggering this behavior.

I still fail to see what could trigger this, but will investigate more in that direction.

I think you should contact the telco operator providing the APN cellular services to your company, and ask them to allow cellular access to www.soti.net for your devices using their provided APN.

All the cellular data is transferred to the local network by the provider and then handled internally. We opened the soti.net address for testing purposes, that's why we have the soti.net page showing up, thing is, we just don't want it to show up.

I captured a logcat of these 2 situations :

- External Wifi = web server not accessible, but no soti.net popup

- 4G custom APN = web server accessible, soti.net popup

These are the differences in displayed result :

External Wifi :

08-20 15:57:47.703 1953 2110 I ActivityManager: Displayed net.soti.surf/.ui.activities.SplashActivity: +621ms
08-20 15:57:49.556 1953 2110 I ActivityManager: Displayed net.soti.surf/.ui.activities.BrowseContainerActivity: +763ms

4G custom APN :

08-20 15:51:47.059 1953 2110 I ActivityManager: Displayed net.soti.surf/.ui.activities.SplashActivity: +800ms
08-20 15:51:49.048 1953 2110 I ActivityManager: Displayed net.soti.surf/.ui.activities.CaptiveNetworkAuthenticationActivity: +247ms (total +842ms)
08-20 15:51:51.277 30682 30682 I chromium: [INFO:CONSOLE(10234)] "window ready", source: https://www.soti.net/scripts/main.js?v=1 (10234)

Surf seems to think it' on a captive network and does a thing similar to guest networks on access point, to open an authentication page. I Still don't know what triggers it, but something does.

BTW, on ethernet, internal wifi, the website is accessed fine with no popup, the only situation triggering this is on the custom 4G network.

To be noted too, if I open the website with chrome on this custom 4G network, it opens fine, no popup.

I have a case open with EU support, but it seems it won't be solved that way.

They can't replicate the issue, and the mobicontrol server can't be accessed by soti from the outside as gated behind VPN with exclusive internal access.

I tried to push further on the captive network side of things, but any adb commands that should help disable its detection are not helping.

The only way out of this seems to have soti surf modified to bypass that captive network activity, which means hoping for a dev ticket to see it coming in a future version...

What would be really nice btw, is if a SOTI rep could ask the devs what circumstances would trigger that captive network behaviour with soti surf, it would really help us to find a way around it.

FYI, the issue is fixed in Surf v14.4.3 B3