How to sign into an open Wireless Network?

If redirect page does not load, and reconnecting does not fix the issue, then the easiest next step is to address the router directly.

Try 192.168.1.1. That is the most common default address, and is often not changed.

Addressing the router should send you to the redirect page.

What you describe is called a captive portal. They are typically used for authentication on Wi-Fi hotspots, but can be used to control wired network access as well.

There are several ways to implement a captive portal:

• HTTP Redirection

  In this case, DNS queries from unauthenticated clients are resolved as normal. However, when the browser makes a HTTP request to the resolved IP address, the request is intercepted by a firewall acting as a transparent proxy. The client HTTP request is forwarded to a server in the local network which issues a server-side redirect with a HTTP 302 Found status code, which will redirect the client to the captive portal.

• DNS Redirection

  In DNS based redirection the firewall ensures that only the DNS server(s) provided by DHCP may be used by authenticated clients. The firewall could also redirect any DNS queries from unauthenticated clients to the local DNS server. This DNS server will in turn return the IP address of the captive portal as a response to all DNS lookups made by unauthenticated clients.

• IP Redirection

  In redirection working on the IP layer a router performs Destination Network Address Translation (DNAT) to reroute packets originating from an captive hosts to the captive portal. In cases where the captive portal software runs on the router itself, the packets are directed to an internal interface instead. Packets headed from the captive portal to the host get in turn their source address rewritten so that they would appear to originate from the original destination.

When troubleshooting captive portal issues, the first step would be to identify what type of redirection is in use and at which point the redirection fails. The right tool for this job is a packet analyzer, such as Wireshark. Keep in mind though, that your school's IT policy might prohibit the use of packet sniffers on the local network as such tools could easily be used to invade the privacy of others on an unencrypted network.

You could also consult the tech support at your school. They would be aware of the captive portal configuration on the local Wi-Fi network, and especially if faculty members are using Linux they probably could help in pinpointing the source of the problem.

In my case being signed in to Chrome was getting in the way. When I opened up an incognito window and went to a random webpage the redirection worked. I got this idea from a post on an Arch Linux thread.