Getting started

Three steps: sign in, save your SmartZone credentials, add the connector to Claude. Before any of them, check your controller’s certificate — it is what stops most first attempts.

0. Check your controller’s TLS certificate first

Your SmartZone controller must present a publicly trusted TLS certificate on the port you expose. SmartZone ships with a self-signed certificate. Cloudflare Workers validate certificates on every outbound fetch and expose no skip-verify option, so a self-signed controller cannot be reached at all — not in a degraded way, not at all.

If your controller still has its default certificate, install one from a public CA before going further. Let’s Encrypt with a DNS-01 challenge is the simplest route, because it does not require inbound port 80.

Caution

This is not a warning you can defer. With a self-signed certificate, Save & detect fails on the first attempt and every attempt after it, and the failure reads like a credentials problem rather than a certificate one. See Controller requirements for the full picture, including which host addresses are refused outright.

1. Sign in

1. Go to sz-mcp.lanpulse.com.

2. Accept the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, then continue with Google.

3. That Google account is your SZ-MCP identity — the same account backs both the web dashboard and the Claude connector.

Your session lasts 30 days.

2. Save your SmartZone credentials

In the dashboard, fill in the credentials form:

Field	What it takes
Host / FQDN	The controller’s bare hostname or IP — sz.example.com. No scheme, no path, no port
Port	Defaults to 8443, SmartZone’s usual public API port
Username	A SmartZone admin username
Password	That admin’s password. Never shown again once saved
Label	Optional. Your own nickname for this controller

Then click Save & detect.

What “Save & detect” actually does

It logs in to your controller for real. SZ-MCP tries a ranked list of SmartZone API versions, newest first, and keeps the first one that accepts a login — so a pass means the whole chain works: the certificate, the host, the port, the username and the password.

On success the dashboard reports the version it settled on, for example Saved. Detected API version v13_1.

If it fails, the message names the reason. See Troubleshooting — and read SmartZone credentials for what each error code means and how version detection decides when to stop.

Use a dedicated admin account

Claude can reach every endpoint this account is permitted to call, including writes and deletes. Create a SmartZone admin scoped to the minimum role and domain your use case needs, rather than reusing one meant for humans. See Security model.

3. Copy your MCP URL and connect Claude

Copy the MCP URL from the dashboard — it is https://sz-mcp.lanpulse.com/mcp/ — then follow Connecting to Claude.

The URL is the same for every user. What identifies you is the OAuth token Claude obtains when it connects, which is bound to your account.

4. Try it

Ask Claude something concrete:

List the AP zones on my SmartZone.

Then something that needs discovery:

Find the SmartZone endpoint that creates a WLAN, and tell me which fields it requires.

If both work, the connector is healthy end to end. Move on to the examples.

Next steps

Controller requirements The certificate rule in full, the host addresses SZ-MCP refuses, and how to expose the controller safely.

Connecting to Claude The connector flow step by step, plus token lifetimes and how to revoke access.

SmartZone credentials Field limits, API version detection, testing, rotating and deleting what you saved.

Troubleshooting What each save and test failure means, and which layer to fix.