Users Guide

303| Captive Portal Authentication Dell Networking W-Series ArubaOS 6.5.x| User Guide
There are differences in how captive portal functions work and how you configure captive portal, depending on
whether the license is installed. Other parts of this chapter describe how to configure captive portal in the base
operating system (without the PEFNG license) and with the license installed.
Controller Server Certificate
The Dell controller is designed to provide secure services through the use of digital certificates. A server
certificate installed in the controller verifies the authenticity of the controller for captive portal.
Dell controllers ship with a demonstration digital certificate. Until you install a customer-specific server
certificate in the controller, this demonstration certificate is used by default for all secure HTTP connections
such as captive portal. This certificate is included primarily for the purposes of feature demonstration and
convenience and is not intended for long-term use in production networks. Users in a production environment
are urged to obtain and install a certificate issued for their site or domain by a well-known certificate authority
(CA). You can generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) on the controller to submit to a CA. For information
on how to generate a CSR and how to import the CA-signed certificate into the controller, see
Managing
Certificates on page 845 in Management Access on page 824.
The controller can accept wild card server certificates (CN begins with an asterisk). If a wildcard certificate is
uploaded (for example, CN=*.domain.com), the asterisk in CN is replaced with 'captiveportal-login' in order to
derive the Captive Portal logon page URL (captiveportal-login.domain.com).
Once you have imported a server certificate into the controller, you can select the certificate to be used with
captive portal as described in the following sections.
To select a certificate for captive portal using the WebUI:
1. Navigate to the Configuration > Management > General page.
2. Under Captive Portal Certificate, select the name of the imported certificate from the drop-down list.
3. Click Apply.
To select a certificate for captive portal using the command-line interface, access the CLI in config mode and
issue the following commands:
(host)(config) #web-server profile
(host)(Web Server Configuration) #captive-portal-cert <certificate>
To specify a different server certificate for captive portal with the CLI, use the no command to revert back to
the default certificate before you specify the new certificate:
(host)(config) #web-server profile
(host)(Web Server Configuration) #captive-portal-cert ServerCert1
(host)(Web Server Configuration) #no captive-portal-cert
(host)(Web Server Configuration) #captive-portal-cert ServerCert2
Configuring Captive Portal in the Base Operating System
The base operating system (ArubaOS without any licenses) allows full network access to all users who connect
to an ESSID, both guest and registered users. In the base operating system, you cannot configure or customize
user roles; this function is only available by installing the PEFNG license. Captive portal allows you to control or
identify who has access to network resources.
When you create a captive portal profile in the base operating system, an implicit user role is automatically
created with same name as the captive portal profile. This implicit user role allows only DNS and DHCP traffic
between the client and network and directs all HTTP or HTTPS requests to the captive portal. You cannot
directly modify the implicit user role or its rules. Upon authentication, captive portal clients are allowed full
access to their assigned VLAN.