Applies to: Sophos Home Premium and Free (Mac)
Affects Mac OS 10.14+
This article addresses a known issue where Mac users are unable to sign in to public or guest Wi-Fi Hotspots while using the Sophos Home software.
We are currently working on a permanent solution to this issue.
Please, follow the below listed workarounds to alleviate the problem:
Workaround Instructions:
Option 1. Restart PUA protection
- Log in to your Sophos Home Dashboard
- Choose the desired computer and go to PROTECTION tab
- Click on the Potentially Unwanted Application (PUA) Protection slider, to disable it (turns gray)
- Allow a couple of minutes for the Sophos Home Shield to reflect PUA is disabled (orange color)
- Go back to the Dashboard and turn PUA protection back on -(blue position)
- Re-try accessing the Wifi portal
Option 2. Access the login via page via Safari, by using terminal
- Open Finder. Search for and launch Terminal.
- Type the following command: open -a "Safari" http://google.com
- This will launch Safari and should display the Wi-Fi login page.
Option 3. Attempt to connect to the Wi-Fi hotspot through a different browser other than Safari
- Make sure Safari is closed.
- Navigate to a secure site such as https://google.com on another browser other than Safari. There will be a security error which is normal as the computer will not have that certificate.
- Choose to continue and the Wi-Fi portal page should appear.
The below listed workarounds are for advanced users only:
(Ensure you have read the Additional Notes at the bottom of this article)
Option 4. Use a mobile device to determine the URL/IP Address of the Wi-Fi Hotspot login page and add an exception under Sophos Home web protection
- First, you need to determine what is the URL/IP address of the Hotspot login page. The easiest way to do this is to try to connect with a mobile device. Look at the address bar of the browser connecting and note the URL/IP Address
- Log in your Sophos Home Dashboard and add the URL/IP address noted in step 1 as a Website exception.
Note: When adding the Web Exception, you should only include the domain or IP address. For example, if the URL = https://companyfreewifi.com/login you would add https://companyfreewifi.com leaving out anything after the domain.
Option 5. Use Terminal to determine the URL/IP Address of the Wi-Fi Hotspot login page and add an exception under Sophos Home web protection
- To determine the URL/IP Address, open Finder and navigate to Applications > Utilities and launch Terminal.
- Run the following command: sudo tcpdump -vv | grep href* and minimize terminal. Now try to connect to the Wi-Fi login page through a browser. Pop up your terminal window again and you should see the address it attempted to connect to. See example below:
- Log in your Sophos Home Dashboard and add the URL/IP address noted in step 1 as a Website exception.
Note: When adding the Web Exception, you should only include the domain or IP address. For example using the URL noted above, we would add http://10.255.0.1:4501
Additional Note: Web exceptions will only work if the system is connected to the internet.
- If you have only Safari, copy the link from the output in the terminal and run the command open <URL> and it will open in Safari.
- In this example use the command open http://10.255.0.1:4501/index.cgi
- To make it simpler run the command sudo tcpdump -vv | grep href exit the dump using ctrl + c and type open <paste the URL> and hit ENTER or use the same URL in the Safari browser directly.
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