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app-storewifihotspot

Give access to the AppStore in a WiFi HotSpot


One of our hotel clients provide free WiFi to its guests with a Hot Spot, however, there are available only a few URL to access them freely (such as Facebook or the website of the hotel) and if you need more access you should log in.

We have developed the App for the hotel and one of its features is that if you open the App it gives you a complete access to the hotel WiFi, so you can navigate to any page you want.

Therefore, it is necessary that the guests can download the app through the AppStore without being logged in to the hotel WiFi, so the guest can download the App and get the access immediately.

We have a trace of the URL that calls the AppStore for search and downloading the App and we have set the Hot Spot to allow access to this URL, however, the AppStore tells us that we have no connection.

What URL should we need to enable in our Hot Spot for the AppStore to work properly?

These are the routes that have enabled:

search.itunes.apple.com

play.itunes.apple.com

init.itunes.apple.com

su.itunes.apple.com

itunes.apple.com

se.itunes.apple.com

p59-buy.itunes.apple.com

pd-st.itunes.apple.com

xp.apple.com

sp.itunes.apple.com

Thank you for your help.


Solution

  • Apple Appstore communicate using HTTPS. So router in the middle will not know what url that been use by client due to it's encrypted.

    The solution is, instead of allow those by url. you need to allow it by ip address.

    I would suggest to allow connection to the following address.

    17.154.0.0/16 Apple's Class B Subnet includes phobos.apple.com address(es)
    23.63.98.0/23 Akamai Technologies CDN
    

    Please keep in mind that xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/16 mean 255.255.0.0.

    And it will be equal to allow ip adresss from 17.154.0.0 - 17.154.255.255

    Also Akamai is a Content delivery service So ip address will various from location. I would suggest you to try to ping swcdn.apple.com get ipaddress and allow those /23 server.