How does captive portal work – Dell POWEREDGE M1000E User Manual

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Configuring a Captive Portal

Figure 17-2. Customized Captive Portal Welcome Screen

How Does Captive Portal Work?

When a port is enabled for Captive Portal, all the traffic coming onto the port

from the unverified clients are dropped except for the ARP, DHCP, DNS and

NETBIOS packets. These packets are allowed to be forwarded by the switch

so that the unverified clients can get an IP address and are able to resolve the

hostname or domain names. Data traffic from verified clients goes through as

expected. If an unverified client opens a web browser and tries to connect to

the network, the Captive Portal redirects all the HTTP/HTTPS traffic from

the unverified clients to the authenticating server on the switch. A Captive

Portal web page is sent back to the unverified client. If the verification mode

for the Captive Portal associated with the port is Guest, the client can be

verified without providing authentication information. If the verification

mode is Local or RADIUS, the client must provide credentials that are

compared against the information in the Local or RADIUS client database.

After the user successfully provides the required information, the Captive

Portal feature grants access to the network.

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