Paypal transaction adding in minutes ok, FirstSpot no ack?

[smu johnson]

Hello,

We have a strange problem that we've been able to pinpoint where it happens.

note: We are using passive logins with MAC addresses.

When a username is created with a MAC address with 0 minutes, Firstspot will happily bring that user to the Cart.php page to purchase minutes. We pick a plan of 50 minutes, make the paypal transaction, and find that through FirstSpot's cfgmgr that the minutes have been added in FirstSpot properly.

This is the moment of the problem. It won't let the MAC passively log in correctly, and says the user is unauthenticated correctly, and despite have 50 minutes in this case, won't let you go to www.yahoo.com or whatever the user wants.

To get it to actually work, all we have to do is go into CFGMGR -> Users, find the MAC address, simply hit EDIT, then SAVE. And THEN it works.

We are unsure what is causing this, and using the latest 4.x captive portal software. We have a due date of Fri 10 of Nov (today), so anything that would help us would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

[smu johnson]

Dear Patronsoft,

We have spent countless hours trying to get around this problem with no success. The only way to circumvent this problem is to either Edit -> Save the user in the CFGMGR (which we shouldn't have to do) or restart FirstSpot (not practical).

The problem in a nutshell: We are using passively logged in MAC address user names, and when the User goes to the cart to pay for time, gets sent to paypal, and pays for his time, FirstSpot shows the time in the User Config screen, but will not passively log in the user. Even trying to log in by simply not entering a password (to passively log in) and clicking Submit will give us an Invalid User type error.

Thank you for your help

[smu johnson]

Correction:

On the first message, we wrote:

"It won't let the MAC passively log in correctly, and says the user is unauthenticated correctly, and despite have 50 minutes in this case, won't let you go to www.yahoo.com or whatever the user wants. "

We meant to say "... and says the user is not authenticated, saying Invalid User."

Thanks.

[philip]

Hi,

You should not be able to use the shopping cart feature with passive login.
FirstSpot will redirect you to an authentication page and you are not suppose to have password to log in.

I wonder if you have modified the php on your own?

Cheers,
Philip
_________________
~ Patronsoft Limited ~

[smu johnson]

Hi and thank you for taking interest in my problem.

To answer your questions:

We are using the login_form.php what comes with FirstSpot, unmodified. What we do is:

1) add the MAC address from a test computer hooked up to firstspot manually in the cfgmgr -> Users menu, (clicking MAC address usertype and passive login). Then, on the section that says "When airtime credit is used up -- Current time left (mins):" we put 0 minutes, in hopes that it recognizes that this new user addition needs to pay for time.

2) Proceed to try to access a site like yahoo.ca to test the HotSpot page that should fire up because the user hasn't paid for any airtime plans yet.

At this point, it recognizes the MAC address that is connecting to it is in the user database, and that it's set to passively log in, so it takes out the "USERNAME" field. The problem here I noticed is that it still asks for a password in the password field. Since you can't put a password on a passive login, we just hit Submit. And now, since there is no time, it automatically sends us to the cart.php page to pay for a plan.

At this point, we pay for a "Plan A" with 50 minutes time on paypal, and FirstSpot successfully adds in the time. But when we click Return to Marchant on the paypal page, it fires us back to the Hotspot, and we notice on the cfgmgr that the MAC address is not showing up in the Status page... ie, the user is not passively logging in. We hit the submit button like we did before to "log in", and it says Invalid User.

The only problem we have found that fixes this, is to go to the User config page, select the MAC address from the User list, hit Edit, then Save. THEN, lo and behold, everything works fine.

......

The reason we are doing it this way is because our company has requested us NOT to allow the users to have to log in to user their airtime, and that their airtime starts counting down the instant that they complete the PayPal transaction. Everything works perfectly up to this point, except this Edit -> Save necessity. If this minor thing was corrected, it would be a miracle for us and would give us boundless peace of mind.

Thank you very much for reading this long post. Good day!

[alan]

Well, this should be a problem for FirstSpot.

A slightly easier workaround is run the program "QueryPassiveLogin.exe" after the user pays the money in PayPal.

We are working on a better workaround. Will post it here once we make any progress...
_________________
~ Patronsoft Limited ~

[smu johnson]

Thank you very much! I look forward to any progress. I appreciate all your guys's help.

[chrisli]

It is another method to improve when using paypal with passive login account.

please do the following steps:

1. Open "ppal_ipn.php" which located in [FirstSpot Directory]\local\
2. search for "else if (strcmp ($res, "INVALID") == 0)"
2. you should see code as shown below:

// check that payment_amount/payment_currency are correct
// process payment

}
else if (strcmp ($res, "INVALID") == 0)
{

3. insert the following code between '// process payment' and '}'

$settingobj = new COM('FSCONFIG.Cfgmgr') or die;
$path = realpath("..\\");
$path .= "\\dispatcher\\QueryPassiveLogin.exe";
$cmd="\"$path\"";
system($cmd);
$settingobj->Release();
$settingobj=null;

Hope it solves your problem.
_________________
~ Patronsoft Limited ~

[smu johnson]

Thank you Chrisli for your help. We have been so busy lately that we haven't had time to incorporate your changes, but we will do so when we get a chance.

Your help is greatly appreciated.

[smu johnson]

It works!!!

You are a freaking genius! This saved us MANY headaches and frustrations.

-- cheers!


pS: !!!!!!!!!!!!!

[smu johnson]

Patronsoft,

Thanks again, it works great and the code and the instructions were nice and clean and functional. About the excited response earlier, to see this actually work after literally hours and hours of failure, was a huge relief for us.

Keep up the good work !