Captive Portal cookies, session time and more.....

[djbisbey]

Hi,

we have 3.1.5 and are running a captive portal, can someone explain the use of the cookies in relation to the captive portal? What does it do, what are the advantages of running this?

Also the idle timer and expiration timer what do these do exactly?

I know these are simple questions, but I am trying to make our captive portal more efficient so I could with more of an indepth explanation...

I look forward to your comments.

Darren (Birmingham, UK)

[James · Accepted solution]

Hi Darren,

The cookies have two purposes:

1.  To prevent you from having to re-enter your user credentials once the idle/expiration timers are exceeded on the Captive Portal.  Essentially the cookie does the auth for you.

2.  If you enable it, to allow roaming.  What this means is that your IP address may change - perhaps moving from wired to wireless as an example.

Please note, the browser must remain open for this to work.  Once the browser is shut down the cookie is deleted.

All the best!

James

[James]

Sorry, forgot to mention

The idle timer means the Palo Alto device sees no traffic and assumes the user is no longer on the network.

The exipration timer is how long you would like the login to be valid for.

Thanks

James

[djbisbey]

James,

thanks for the answers.

that has really helped.

Darren