There are a number of aspects relating to the setup of your Fydelia captive wifi splash page. this article aims to go through it all, step by step, and provide the appropriate knowledge base article links.

Let’s begin with an overview:

Overview

All necessary settings for enabling the UniFi external captive portal hotspot are done via a management portal called a “Controller”. Your access points therefore must be connected – or “adopted” – to the controller in order to correctly function as a guest WiFi portal. The controller must be always on if you wish to use services like Fydelia.

When a guest connects to your free WiFi network, called an SSID, UniFi will redirect the guest to the configured hotspot portal in the controller. We’ll take you through those steps below.

During the login process, the guest has very limited internet access. They’re in what’s called a “Walled garden”, which only allows web pages such as the splash page to be visited. Once the guest has logged in via the splash page, Fydelia will contact the controller directly and allow the guest device to have full internet access.

Types of controller

Ubiquiti have a number of different types of controllers and they are all supported by Fydelia:

• On-site controllers
  • Controller software running on a PC typically in your office or in the venue
  • Hardware in your venue such as
    • UniFi Dream Machines
    • UniFi Dream Wall
    • UniFi CloudKey series
• Self hosted / cloud-based such as
  • Fydelia UniFi controller
  • UniFi Hosting
  • 3rd party services such as Hostify

Let’s dig into this a bit more…

On-site controllers

Since Fydelia must be able to communicate directly with your controller, those first two types which typically run on-site, must be reachable.

Ubiquiti UniFi do not permit systems like Fydelia to connect via the “ui.com” portal, because multi-factor authentication isn’t of course possible for a system-to-system interaction, where there are no humans involved.

This implies a few things:

• Your controller must be reachable via:
  • Your external IP
  • A DDNS domain that correctly points to your external IP

You’ll need to port-forward inbound requests to your device. Here are some related articles:

• Allowing direct traffic into your UDM Pro (Dream Machine)
• Restrict access with IP locking using these IP ranges

Self hosted controllers

It’s certainly easier with cloud-based controllers. Fydelia can reach the controller without the need for any kind of port forwarding. For example the controller URL would be something like, for example, https://55460494-e584-4d22-8594-7ff44b1a440b.unifi-hosting.ui.com, meaning that it is reachable via the web.

Which UniFi controller version do you have?

There are a few versions floating around of the UniFi controller, each having subtle differences.

Check out this article which looks at key differences:

https://www.fydelia.com/knowledge-base/the-unifi-controller-interface-versions/

Enabling your UniFi captive portal

Now that you know which version you’re running, have a look at the corresponding setup article:

Version 8+ – click here for the setup guide

Version 7.x – click here for the setup guide

Version 6 and earlier – you can still run fydelia, but we recommend upgrading to avoid any issues. Click for the setup guide – here be dragons.

Settings required on your Fydelia splash page

Click here for the splash page setup article

Connecting your access point and powering up

If you have a new access point and need to get it connected, take a look at this guide:

Connecting your access point