Captive Portal Across Multiple Interfaces Workaround

tempaccount325

Greetings,

I am planning to install a pfSense box very soon at a small Hotel. The machine will serve as the gateway for the Guest Wifi network and hence we will be implementing the captive portal system. This machine will be on the 192.168.151.254/24 subnet.

I have three ethernet cables that will be going to three different unmanaged switches that in turn have approximately five Access Points each (acting as transparent bridges). These access points will be on the 10.10.10.1/24 subnet. The machine in production has 4 NICs ( one designated for WAN and the remainder destined to the Guest network ). I have read on Matt Williamson's Cookbook that it not possible to have Captive Portal running on my setup (multiple NICs and Captive Portal).

Which is the proper path to handle this issue? Would an external unmanaged switch solve this issue? Wouldn't this create Layer 2 Loops or packets taking longer paths and subsequently a lower throughput?

Excuse my lack of knowledge in this issue, but in the past I have just kept my self to quick fixes, because that was what I was requested to do.

Best Regards.

tempaccount325

I am the original poster. Due to the lack of response in this topic, I will pay less attention to it and just chain one more switch into my network.
It is mentioned in various sources that having Captive Portal on more than one interface is not possible, but it never seems to cover bridging or VLANs. The sources themselves may contain information that no longer holds truth.

I have reduced my build for a 60 room hotel (some external users - peak at wireless 50 concurrent users - no users connected by ethernet) to:
2 GHz Dual Core Intel Processor
128 GB HDD (for squid caching and other network services)
4 GB RAM (for the above and other packages)
3 Gigabit Intel NICs

I will try to update this topic.

Gertjan

Hi,
@tempaccount325:

I have read on Matt Williamson's Cookbook that it not possible to have Captive Portal running on my setup (multiple NICs and Captive Portal).

Upgrade pfSense.
Upgrade the book.
Now you can have a portal interface on every (internal) LAN NIC.

tempaccount325

Thank you. I guess, I will proceed with my build. Local PC builders can get really slow during summer time.

tempaccount325

I have built the computer and I am now running pfSense with the above setup and one interface for LAN and the other for WAN. The remaining NIC will not be supported until pfSense 2.2 comes around.

I do have a bit of an issue with DHCP leases/timeouts and Captive Portal timeouts , but it's somewhat fixed: https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=80255.0.