Maximum sessions for Captive Portal

[kalyanram.piratla]

Hi Guys,

On a PA-500, is there any specification for the maximum number of sessions or user logins at any given point of time for Captive Portal users?  Enquiring because, there is a known environment (school with boarding as well) (staff and student VLANs) where maximum traffic passes through Captive Portal.

Many Thanks,

Kal

[essnet]

Captive portal is only used a few seconds, time for user to input his login and passwords, after that it's not used much. I have a population of 300+ users on Captive portal and it's behaving well.

[kalyanram.piratla]

Well, I am glad it is working at your end.  The problem I am facing at the moment is; my client has had the PA-500's (running HA) crash for 3 consecutive days.  This required a manual reboot (via GUI) to allow internet access and network traffic to pass through.

Another very strange issue in this case was both the units had crashed and there was no failover taking place; neither was the configuration synchronizing.

Note:  Nothing wrong with the configuration as had done the installation and was running with the same config for nearly 6months with no issues.

This has happened all of a sudden / random.  I had this raised with PAN and the support engineer thought there might be an issue with the number of clients using Captive Portal ( he would confirm on this and come back to me).

We looked at the arp cache as well and it seemed alright.

Cheers..

Kal

[ggarrison]

Kalyanram,

While there is no maximum number of captive portal sessions on any device, there is an effective limit of 64,000.  This is constrained by the maximum number of authenticated users on the device, which is 64,000.  Also, there is a limit of 2,500 concurrent captive portal sessions, and this is the maximum number of users that can be authenticating using captive portal at any given time, however the total number of users authenticated in this manner may be much higher (up to the limit of 64,000).  Regarding the device stability problems, I recommend opening a case with support if you have not already done so.

Regards,

Graham P. Garrison

[kalyanram.piratla]

Thanks Graham.  Makes sense.