I'm looking for feed back on different wireless captive portals that people have implemented / used / administered. I'm mainly looking for usage tracking and displaying and agreeing to terms of use.
Suggestions / personal experience / etc.
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Thanks. I've found a few on sourceforge that I was interested in - I just wanted to hear back from people who've installed them and see what they found that they liked / disliked.
I'm going to leave this question up for another day or two to see if anybody else reponds - other then that...... Thanks - I'll check out Guestgate.
For my case - I ended up using smoothwall 2.0 express with a captive portal mod - this worked well for me because i also needed to block out porn (content filtering), control bandwidth, track usage, and print out reports.
I was able to accomplish all this using smoothwall 2.0 express and smoothiemods.
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by: JohnjcesPosted on 2008-03-18 at 14:14:21ID: 21155917
It sounds like you may have already searched "Captive Portal" and "WiFi" on SourceForge.net and if so there are a few.
http://sourceforge.net/sea
I have checked out a couple of them and one of them was Less Networks Hotspot Server. It seemed to be linked to a larger database of users and I was seeking a standalone type that i could fully manage and I didn't want my users/guests to have to register in order to use the free public wireless we made available. The main thing I wanted was a web page and acceptable use policy that a guest must accept.
I cannot recall the other OpenSource I looked at but again was linked via the Internet to a larger database of users. Again I did not want that.
I tested a device called a GuestGate from Intellinet Networks. Cool device, about $250 USD. Allows a captive welcome screen where you can put your disclaimer. You can make a password for all users etc. One of the neatest things was that it secured users from each other by supplying IPs "all over the place" in a single virtual network for each user.
We had problems with the devices. After a couple of days no one could hit the INternet. At first we could not even get to the admin web interface. Tech support started out being pretty responsive for the first several 'tickets". They stopped responding after I downloaded and installed a beta firmware. After that could get to the web admin but users could not access the INternet until it got rebooted.
Other than that a great idea. Nice size, but not certain how reliable it is.
The best way is to read up on the OpenSource portals, Install them and try them out. get an empty box with no OS as most are Linux distros.
In the meantime, I am still looking too, for a good one and am in the process of writing a Captive Portal in Delphi for Windows. Got some done... a lot more to go. At least it will be the way I want it.
John