1.      Introduction

Captive Portal is a Guest management platform for NetCyte NAC System. It is used for registering and authentication of Guest users. It is also used for Authentication Portal for Corporate users.

Because it is a web application platform, its appearance should be customized based on user types and needs. This document aims to explain how to customize Captive Portal servers from NAC Server management panel

2.      Captive Portal

a.      Installation

Captive Portal is deployed as customized virtual machine images. These images can be run on Hyper-V or  VMWare ESXi Server.

Please use the below links to download predefined Virtual Machine according to your virtualisation environment. 

For VMWare ESX Environment:

http://download.netcyte.co/NetCyte/NetCyte-Captive-ESX.zip

For Hyper-V Environment:

http://download.netcyte.co/NetCyte/NetCyte-Captive-HyperV.zip

For deployment of the virtual machine, please refer to your virtualisation platform guide. Once you finish deployment, you can access the Captive Portal through the console.

To log in to Captive Portal use:

Username: root

After the deployment process, you can access the virtual machine via console. Once you log in to the system, run the initialize_captive command on the console to set initial system configuration and integrate your NetCyte NAC system.

Figure 1 Initialize Captive and Integrate NAC System

Table 1 Captive Portal Initial Settings

Once you finish your settings, you can access Captive Portal using SSH via e1 IP Address. Also, you can check your Captive Installation on NetCyte Management interface using menu Captive Portal à Captive Portal Settings under Captive Monitoring. Single NetCyte NAC Server can manage one or more Captive Portal at the same time.

You can view which configuration profile is applied on each captive portal. Configuration profiles are set of settings and files which are pooled by the captive portal in each update interval which is configured during Captive Portal initialisation. These settings and data together define how captive portal shows up to uses. You can change applied configuration profile editing Captive Portal using modify option.

b.      Creating Configuration Group

Configuration groups are located under the Captive PortalàCaptive Portal Settingsà Group Configuration.

Figure 3 Captive Portal Configuration Groups

Default Group is predefined configuration profile. You can edit this profile or create a copy of this profile by using Create Copy button under Modify column.

Figure 4 Create New Configuration Profile

After creating a new configuration profile, one copy of Resource and Resource Setting is also created for the new profile.

c.       Resource and Resource Settings

Resource and Resource settings contain actual settings and appearance data. You can access both menus under the Captive Portal à Captive Portal Settings.

Resource settings keep files that are required during the operation. They are mainly configuration and server-side PHP files. In general, there is no need to change these file contents.

On the other hand, Resource Settings contains Setting Information and Text information of each page on the Captive Portal. So, Resource Settings play a crucial role in configuring view of Captive Portal.

Figure 5 Sample Resource Settings

As shown above figure, each Configuration group has its Resource  Settings. Each Resource Settings (Name) belong to Specific Settings Groups (Resource Name).

Resource Name indicates the location of settings in Captive Portal User Interface. For Example, Settings_Guest contains setting information about Guest Page of Captive Portal or Setting_Corporate contains settings related with Corporate user page of Captive Portal.

Setting Group, whose name starts with the keyword “Settings_”, is enabled or disabled. They do not contain text values shown in the Captive Portal.

Setting Groups with names starting with “Translate_” keyword contains Text information which is shown on the Captive Portal User Interface.

If you want to enable/disable part of the menu, you need to manipulate settings whose starts with “Settings_”  keyword. If you want to edit the content of  a page, you need to edit the Settings Groups whose name is predefined by key word “Translate_” Settings Groups whose name is predefined by keyword “Translate_”.

Fallowing tables summarize the definition of Setting Groups and Important Settings Names.

Setting Group Names:

 Important Setting Names: 

Please note that if you are using multiple configuration profiles, ensure that you are selecting correct configuration profile while doing your changes. Your changes will be updated by Captive Portal automatically after next pooling from Database.