Importing Guest Accounts

Guest accounts may be created from an existing list by uploading the list to ClearPass Guest.

To import a file with the current list of guest Someone who is permitted to access the enterprise network or Internet through your Network Access Server. Also, as ClearPass Guest, a configurable ClearPass module for secure guest network access management. Access permissions are controlled through an operator profile that can be integrated with an LDAP server or Active Directory login. accounts, go to Guest > Manage Accounts > More Options and click the Import Guest Accounts link. The Import Accounts page opens with the first part of the form Interactive page in the application where users can provide or modify data. displayed, Upload User List.

The Upload User List form provides you with different options for importing guest account data. To complete the form, you must either specify a file containing account information, or type or paste in the account information.

Figure 1  The Upload User List Form for Importing Guest Accounts

The Import Accounts Form, Step 1: Upload User List

Field	Description
Accounts File	Lets you specify a file that contains a list of user accounts. Click the Choose File button in this row to browse to the file and select it.
Accounts Text	Lets you enter the account information directly. Type or paste the information in the text box in this row.
Advanced	To display the advanced options, select the Show additional import options check box in this row.
Character Set	Specifies the character set encoding of the file. ClearPass Guest uses the UTF-8 character set encoding internally to store guest account information. If your accounts file is not encoded in UTF-8, the import might fail or produce unexpected results if non-ASCII American Standard Code for Information Interchange. An ASCII code is a numerical representation of a character or an action. characters are used. To avoid this, you should specify what character set encoding you are using.
Import Format	Specifies the file format of the file. Options include: Automatically detect format (This default option recognizes guest accounts exported from ClearPass Policy Manager Module of the ClearPass access management platform used to create and enforce security policies across a network for all devices and applications. OnGuard and Profiler features and some Guest and AirGroup configuration items are included within the Policy Manager user interface. in XML Extensible Markup Language. A markup language that defines rules for encoding documents in a format both human-readable and machine-readable. format) XML Comma separated values Tab separated values Pipe (|) separated values Semicolon (;) separated values Colon (:) separated values The format of the accounts file is automatically detected. You may specify a different encoding type if automatic detection is not suitable for your data.
Header	If your data contains a header row that specifies the field In a database or a user interface, a single item of information; attribute. names, select the Force first row as header row check box in this row. This option is only required if the header row is not automatically detected.   The header row must contain the mac_auth and mac columns. The mac_auth value should be set to 1, and the mac value should be the MAC address Media Access Control Address. Unique identifier assigned to network interfaces for communications on a network. A device may have a wired network address and a wireless network address.. Any other fields may also be included.
Next Step	Uploads the account data and proceeds to the next step.

In step 2 of 3, ClearPass Guest determines the format of the uploaded account data and matches the appropriate fields to the data. The first few records in the data are displayed, together with any automatically detected field names.

In this example, the following data was used:

username,guest_name,password,expire_time
demo005,Demo five,secret005,2011-06-10 09:00
demo006,Demo six,secret006,2011-06-11 10:00
demo007,Demo seven,secret007,2011-06-12 11:00
demo008,Demo eight,secret008,2011-06-13 12:00
demo009,Demo nine,secret009,2011-06-13 12:00
demo010,Demo ten,secret010,2011-06-13 12:00
demo011,Demo eleven,secret011,2011-06-13 12:00

Because this data includes a header row that contains field names, the corresponding fields were automatically detected in the data:

Figure 2  Data File with Fields Detected from Header Row

Use the Match Fields form to identify which guest account fields are present in the imported data. You can also specify the values to be used for fields that are not present in the data.

Figure 3  The Match Fields Form

To complete the Match Fields form, make a selection from each of the drop-down lists. Choose a column name to use the values from that column when importing guest accounts, or select one of the other available options to use a fixed value for each imported guest account.

Click the Next Step () button to preview the final result. Import Step 3 of 3, the Import Accounts form, opens and shows a preview of the import operation. The values of each guest account field are determined, and any conflicts with existing user accounts are shown.

Figure 4  The Import Accounts Form

The icon displayed for each user account indicates whether it is a new entry () or if an existing user account will be updated ().

By default, this form shows ten entries per page. To view Page in the application that displays data but does not contain interactive fields the user can modify. Usually a table listing things like accounts or other sets of data and providing links to related actions or forms. additional entries, click the arrow button at the bottom of the form to display the next page, or click the 10 rows per page drop-down list at the bottom of the form and select the number of entries that should appear on each page.

Click the check box by the account entries you want to create, or click one of the links in the Select field at the top of the form to select the desired accounts. These options links are described in .

The Import Accounts Form, Options Links

Field	Description
This Page	Selects all entries on the current page.
All	Selects all entries on all pages.
None	Deselects all entries.
New	Selects all new entries.
Existing	Selects all existing user accounts in the list.
Create Guest Accounts	Click the button to finish the import process. The selected items will be created or updated. You can then print new guest account receipts or download a list of the guest accounts. See Creating Multiple Guest Account Receipts in this chapter for more information.