Technical data

Chapter 10

Captive Portals for Temporary Users

If you want to give limited wireless access to a group of users, use Captive Portal.

Captive Portal is a feature designed to isolate temporary users on a network, for

example guests in a company or students using a library. If Captive Portal is enabled,

the HTTP protocol over Secure Socket Layer (SSL, also known as HTTPS) provides an

encrypted login interchange with the Radius server until the user is authenticated

and authorized. During this interchange, all traffic with the CLIent station except

DHCP, ARP, and DNS packets is dropped until access is granted. If access is not

granted, the user is unable to leave the Captive Portal login page. If access is

granted, the user is released from the Captive Portal page and is allowed to enter

the WLAN. This section provides instructions to both implement Captive Portal and

customize the GUI pages for Meru Captive Portal. Guest Login is disabled by default

and requires privilege level 1 (lowest level). You can either Configuring Meru Captive

Portal or use Third-Party Captive Portal Solutions.

Configuring Meru Captive Portal

To implement the built-in Captive Portal feature, complete these tasks (only two

tasks are required). The Captive Portal configuration tasks are:

 Optionally Customize and Use Your Own HTML Pages

 Configure Meru Captive Portal with the CLI or Configure Meru Captive Portal with

the CLI

 For authentication, either Configure a Radius Server for Captive Portal

Authentication or Create Meru Captive Portal Guest User IDs Locally

 Optionally Configure Pre-Authentication Captive Portal Bypass

Note:

The Radius attributes for Dynamic VLAN assignment (Tunnel-Type,

Tunnel-Medium-Type, and Tunnel-Private-Group-ID, see the command vlan

support) are not supported and are ignored if returned as part of the Radius

exchange.

Captive Portal does not support bridged profiles.

Security logging must be set to on before passthrough will work. Also, security

logging has to be toggled of/on for any new settings to take effect.