Does Captive Portal work with 3rd Party AP's?

[CBNW]

1. Does the Captive Portal feature on “MAX”, “BALANCE” & “SOHO” routers work with 3rd Party AP’s ?

• If yes, can someone provide any setup documentation for this config (I was unable to find any on this forum or product manuals).

2. Also, I notice that Peplink is encouraging the Peplink captive portal to be setup on ic2. I found the comprehensive “Setup Peplink captive portal on ic2” guide on this forum, but was unable to find the “Setup directly on local peplink router” version.
   Configure Captive Portal in InControl2

• If a “Setup directly on local peplink router” version guide is available, I’d appreciate it if someone could reply with the link.

TIA

[WillJones]

@CBNW

Does the Captive Portal feature on “MAX”, “BALANCE” & “SOHO” routers work with 3rd Party AP’s ?

Yes you can do this - configure the portal onto a specific VLAN, send the users traffic to that VLAN from the 3rd party APs.

@CBNW

If yes, can someone provide any setup documentation for this config (I was unable to find any on this forum or product manuals).

There isn’t really anything special required here frankly, just configure it so the portal applies to a VLAN on your Peplink and send the users traffic into that VLAN, you shouldn’t need to do anything special on your APs either really.

Not sure there is any documentation, on your Peplink navigate to “Network > Captive Portal” and add a portal profile, most of the buttons are pretty self explanatory.

Once you have defined the portal profile navigate to “Network > Network Settings” and add then on the LAN/VLAN interface you can tick to enable the captive portal.

@CBNW

Also, I notice that Peplink is encouraging the Peplink captive portal to be setup on ic2. I found the comprehensive “Setup Peplink captive portal on ic2” guide on this forum, but was unable to find the “Setup directly on local peplink router” version.
Configure Captive Portal in InControl2

Whilst you can configure the portal directly on your peplink, when using Ic2 there are a few more built in options for how to authenticate users directly and managing things like vouchers and so on vs when this is configured on the Peplink itself.

[Aivaras_Priudokas]

Hi! Yes, it should work on third-party APs. I can give a configuration example here, though as I don’t have a third-party AP on hand, I’ll use a Peplink device. Though it should be the same if any other AP would be used as the settings will be generic.

The setup will be:

The captive portal will be configured on the MAX Transit Pro E and the AP ONE AX Lite will act as a generic AP.

Configuration on the MAX Transit Pro E:

1. Configure a VLAN that will be used by the Wi-Fi clients:
   

   

2. Make sure that the port connecting to the AP is a Trunk port that allows both the untagged and captive portal VLAN:
   

   

3. Create the captive portal and map it to the created VLAN:
   

   

Configuration on the AP:
Basically you will need to set up that Wi-Fi clients would use the same VLAN as the captive portal VLAN on the MAX Transit Pro E. In the case of a AP ONE AX Lite, that would be:

1. Set it into Bridge mode:
   

   

2. Create a SSID with the same VLAN as the captive portal:
   

   

Though having said all that, I would still advise creating the captive portal via InControl2 as it just has much more customization options.