Solutions Tech Lab

This is a 4x parts series and in which we’ll cover various aspects of Aruba MPSK.

In part3, the user workflow was that the users who want to register their devices for MPSK, had to login to ClearPass Guest then they would be prompted for a MAC address of their device that they want to register.

This could be problematic for the users since most of them may not even know what the MAC address is and where to get it.

An easier workflow would be to get the user login to ClearPass Guest with their device that needs registration, and we pre-populate the MAC address field with the MAC address of the device. We are going to cover this workflow here.

Aruba Central Configuration

For this workflow, we need to configure a Captive portal profile that redirects the user to Device Registration page. The external captive portal profile we have configured here is “MPSK-Rego” and URL is “/guest/mac_create.php” as seen below.

We’ll then reference that in our Guest-MPSK-Rego WLAN.

Again, here you can make it tunnel mode as well, but we’ll stick to bridge mode.

ClearPass Guest

We just need to ensure that MAC detect is enabled as shown below. You need to go to Administrator-> Plugin manager and enabled it and save the changes.

Testing the new workflow

So now the user with the device that needs to be registered for MPSK, connects to “Guest-MPSK-Rego” SSID it gets redirected to “/guest/mac_create.php”

As before the user is prompted for credentials that gets authenticated against AD.

After successful authentication the user get redirected to Create_Device page.

Note that the MAC address gets automatically populated. Once the user registers the device as before, they see the receipt and gets an email address with the MPSK password.

Here is the email that will also receive.

Once they know the password, they’ll connect to the MPSK SSID as shown below.

You should note that I have assumed that the standard Guest authentication services are already configured on ClearPass Policy Manager.