The Captive Portal

Topic

This article describes the Captive Portal in Datto Network Manager.

Environment

  • Datto Network Manager

Description

The Captive Portal in Datto Network Manager provides flexible support for several different types of splash pages and authentication.

Accessing the Captive Portal

In the Navigation menu, click Access Points, then select the SSID from the expanded options.


Figure 1: the Networking menu

On the SSID page, click the Captive Portal tab.

Figure 2: The SSID page

Configuring the Captive Portal

The captive portal page contains the following options:

Bandwidth throttling

Toggle the Bandwidth Throttling slider to se the maximum download and upload speeds (in Mbps).

Splash Page

Toggle the splash page on to use either the default or a custom splash page. Support for splash pages includes:

  • internally-Hosted Splash Pages hosted by the access point.
  • externally-Hosted Splash Pages that you may write and host on your web server.

Splash Page Authentication

Support for authentication modules includes:

  • authentication using vouchers.
  • authentication via an external RADIUS server.
  • authentication via a specialized HTTP page hosted on your web server.

Splash page and authentication types may be mixed-and-matched. In other words, internally-hosted splash pages may be used with either vouchers or RADIUS authentication, and vice-versa.

Several detailed example configurations are presented here:

Splash Page Behavior

This section contains the following settings:

  • Display name: This option lets you choose a custom display name on your page. If you leave this blank, the system will use the default name of "$gatewayname".

Figure 3: A splash page with the default name

  • Redirect URL: In this field, you can specify a URL to which the system will navigate after the splash page. If you leave this field back, the system will navigate directly to the page that the user requests.

  • Include user data in redirect URL: Check this box to set the MAC addresses of the access point and the client as part of the URL.

  • Block unauthenticated users: This option lets you block all ports all ports until a client device has been authenticated.

  • allowlist: MAC addresses you enter into this field will not see the splash page.

  • Walled Garden: Users can visit the URLs (or IP addresses) you enter in this field prior to authentication. Be sure to place each entry on a separate line.

  • Client Blocking: MAC addresses you enter into this field will be blocked from this SSID. To use this feature, you must enable DNS Intercept from the Advanced SSID Settings tab.

Client blocking does not prevent clients from connecting; it blocks traffic coming from blocked devices.

  • Blocked message: This field lets you customize the message users from blocked MAC addresses will see (up to 128 characters).

  • PayPal: The Item ID value is necessary to configure PayPal access.

Additional Resources