UniFi Captive Portal not authenticating after connecting via Meraki AP

[ITSolutions]

Hello,

I am currently using Cisco Meraki Access Points with a custom splash page redirecting to my UniFi Controller’s captive portal (voucher-based authentication).

The UniFi portal page loads successfully after connecting to the Meraki SSID, but when I enter the voucher code, authentication fails — the UniFi controller does not authorize the client, and the Meraki client remains blocked.

Could this issue be related to Meraki’s Captive Portal API (base_grant_url / user_continue_url integration)?

If an API integration or specific configuration is required to properly forward the authorization from UniFi to Meraki, please guide me on how to implement it.

Thank you very much

[alemabrahao]

I believe it won't work because you're trying to use the captive portal, which is in a different controller, with Meraki.

You can use an external page, but not one that's in another controller, because the controller has a mechanism to redirect to the portal (generally Client connects to SSID and the controller intercepts HTTP and redirects to the splash page), and for that you need to connect to an access point that's connected to it.

[rhbirkelund]

What is the access grant URL that the Unify Controller redirects the client to, once authenticated?

[sungod]

This seems like your previous post https://community.meraki.com/t5/Developers-APIs/Assistance-Required-for-Using-UniFi-Captive-Portal-w...

The provider of captive portal typically provides instructions on how to configure access points to work with their portal.

For instance, the non-Meraki portal might use Radius to grant authentication to clients connecting via Meraki APs, with Purple there's a set of config instructions to set up Dashboard to work with it https://support.purple.ai/hc/en-gb/articles/7580733017885-Cisco-Meraki-AP-MX-Z1  maybe you can compare to your UniFi portal instructions to see if there're any parallels that give a clue.

I suggest contact whoever provides your UniFi support and ask them for their instructions, I'm sure it won't be the first time they've been asked. If they don't support Meraki integration out of the box, you might need to build your own integration using the UniFi API to talk to the Meraki API to get things to work.