WDS Mode and Captive Portal

Routers
1

GL-AXT1800 Slate
Firmware: 4.5.16
Experience: Novice

BLUF: How to access a captive portal while in WDS Mode.

My situation -

I am currently on USS Ship that has public wifi utilizing a captive portal (pf sense). I have no access to the gateway of this network.

I ultimately want to connect my 360Tb Unraid server for local use across the ship's LAN via Plex. While I have a Wi-Fi PCI card, it is not supported in the Unraid OS. This means I'm stuck using the motherboard's ethernet port.

I would like to use my travel router as a "reverse access point" to take the ship's wi-fi and convert it to an ethernet connection.

WDS Mode seems to be the right way to go as it does not make me double NAT, no firewall, and no DCHP, but without an interface to get through the captive portal, the travel router is refused by the ship's gateway. In this mode, I am forced to use the factory MAC address of the travel router...so cloning seems to be out.

Additionally, the ship's gateway routinely forces devices to re-login to the captive portal....best case is about every 12 hours...often a lot less than that.

Any help on the matter would be greatly appreciated.

2

If WDS works normally, it is a bridge and the device on the LAN side will use their own mac address to connect to the main network, causing your portal page to pop up and require authenticate.

I never used WDS with portal. But if you want only router mode and WISP repeater, it should not have this problem and does not requires authenticate on each device.

Understood that you want to bridge. But as there is a portal in this network, idealy it want to manage each devices and don't want you to do bridging

3

If there is a available network infrastructure, I would go with the standard setting, put the Unraid server behind NAT and add a port forwarding rule for each needed service.
So the GL-iNet is doing all the network and forward the services to the server.

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