The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

  • My badges

  • Twitter Updates

  • My Flickr Stream

  • Pages

  • All categories

  • Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 1,860 other subscribers

Archive for the ‘Captive Portal’ Category

msftconnecttest/msftncsi: Trouble connecting to Web sites and services because of certificate errors? Check if you’re being held captive – The Old New Thing

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/05

Note that http://neverssl.com is the way to figure out if you are in a captive portal, see below.

In Windows 10, the name of the endpoint changed from msftncsi to msftconnecttest, presumably to make the purpose of the access more obvious in security and audit logs. Nobody will understand that NCSI stands for Network Connectivity Status Indicator.

[Wayback/Archive] Trouble connecting to Web sites and services because of certificate errors? Check if you’re being held captive – The Old New Thing

It refers to a few other interesting sites, for instance about modifying if/how NCSI detects internet connectivity:

As mentioned at the top: my blog post on http://neverssl.com: NeverSSL – helping you get online on WiFi networks requiring authentication

Other related blog posts:

–jeroen

Posted in Captive Portal, Internet, Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 | Leave a Comment »

Captive portal – Wikipedia

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/08/12

In the past I wrote a few articles containing information about Captive Portals, but I forgot mentioning that the article Captive portal – Wikipedia exists.

Got reminded to this by these tweets about Apple not using the default browser when displaying the Captive Portal page:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Captive Portal, Internet, Power User | Leave a Comment »

A while ago, Windows 10 started to popup an Edge browser window after reboot without an internet connection

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/04/21

Does anyone know how to disable Edge popping up with a failed link www.msftconnecttest.com/redirect on machines blocked by a router?

This happens on the PC running Windows 10 Pro N (winver shows 1709 build 16299.371) that is not allowed to do any internet access.

Related: [WayBack] How to Find Out Which Build and Version of Windows 10 You Have | ilicomm

Later:

This seems to be intended as per these links:

TL;DR:

This can happen on Windows 8 and up when Windows thinks there is a partial network connection and a logon to a proxy or captive portal might solve the solution.

Allowing these in the proxy for port 80 solves the issue:

  •  *.msftncsi.com
  • *.msftconnecttest.com

--jeroen

Posted in Captive Portal, Internet, Power User, Windows, Windows 10 | Leave a Comment »

URLs and domains that OS-es use to detect Captive Portals

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/05/11

OS X

Android / Chromebook:

  • clients3.google.com

iOS 6:

  • gsp1.apple.com
  • *.akamaitechnologies.com

iOS 7:

  • www.appleiphonecell.com
  • www.airport.us
  • *.apple.com.edgekey.net
  • *.akamaiedge.net
  • *.akamaitechnologies.com

iOS 8/9:

Windows

Amazon Kindle (Fire)

OS X settings are in:

  • /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/CaptiveNetworkSupport/Settings.plist

--jeroen

via:

Posted in Captive Portal, Communications Development, Development, Hardware, Internet, Internet protocol suite, Network-and-equipment, Power User, Software Development, TCP | Leave a Comment »

Fake Internet Connectivity for your Lab (Tricking NCSI) – via: Canberra Premier Field Engineering

Posted by jpluimers on 2013/06/21

If you ever wondered why how in Windows – as of Vista – the NCIS (network connection status indicator) determines if you have a valid internet connection, it is pretty simple, as both these pages explain:

NCIS depends on the msftncis.com domain (link to the checks from IntoDNS) and is for supporting Network Awareness in applications.

The probing is done in this order: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Captive Portal, DNS, Internet, Power User, Windows, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Vista | Leave a Comment »