Public Wifi control access via authentication

[akimba]

Hi All

I am a committee member of a club and we have a wireless router at present and give out the passkey to use it but we have had people abusing it so we want to put some level of authentication on it so we can see who's doing what.

The ideal solution would be to sign up to the cloud http://www.thecloud.net/wifi/ but this is a bit too expensive for us with £199 outlay and £30+ a month.

I have been looking at other alternatives like http://www.hotspotsystem.com/ but am not sure how reputable they are etc.

Anyone else done something similar, I don't really want to put in a firewall and AP's etc due to costs just rather we got some sort of web based authentication proxy really.

[evilsatan]

Do you want to monitor clients or do you just want to impose restrictions? You can use a DD-WRT box as a WAP which allows you to use keyword/URL filtering, I think you can also control what extensions can be used (block .torrent for example) and you can probably limit bandwidth. If not then Draytek routers allow all this and separate SSIDs so you can have a private unrestricted network for staff and a restricted network for the public. You can use VLANS if you need to isolate traffic to protect against server hacks etc. Grab a cheap second hand older model off of ebay.

DD-WRT does have a hotspot section in the config but I haven't used it, that may also help you.

[evilsatan]

Funnily enough you linked to one of the DD-WRT services but there are also alternatives such as Sputnik and Chillispot:
http://www.hotspotsystem.com/installation-guide-dd-wrt

[akimba]

Bought a DLink DD-WRT flashed router off ebay for £15 will let you know how I get on ;-)

So with this I can setup all the Pub/Priv network but I will still have to pay for hotspotsystems or someone else to do the authentication. As say not too worried about what people are doing but if they have to authenticate via an email/password (like you have to in an hotel) it might make them a little more sensible about what they are doing on the wifi.

[evilsatan]

How many concurrent users are you expecting? I assume you ordered the D-Link DIR-615 as they were the cheapest compatible router but I am not sure how they stand up to many concurrent users.