Proxy Servers and Transparent Proxy with Smart Phones

[MartinC]

We have a 100MB barer we have plugged into our Wifi using some nice ASUS dual band routers around the office for a cheap office wifi solution, but I have been asked to put some form of control/reporting on the wifi, now normally I would use a proxy server and that would be fine, but then you have all the hassle of entering proxy info into smartphones and tablets when using it, which is not ideal as this is for guests as well as staff.

I have looked into to WPAD/PAC and transparent proxy's, but they all have issues, so what I would like to know has anyone else come across this issue and found a nice solution on the cheap/free or if need be can recommend a paid solution that works well, as if it ticks all the boxes I don't mind speeding some of the companies money on it.

Any help or advice on this would be really helpful.

[Over Carl]

You might want to try out untangle. The free version isn't that great, better to setup a full/trial version then you can get an idea whether it suits your needs. You can set it up as a transparent bridge so no config of other devices needed, or you could put your ASUS into modem only mode if supported and let the untangle be your actual router and DHCP server so again no need to reconfigure devices. No fancy DHCP settings like Windows DHCP server, just basic stuff, but I doubt you would have had much more on the ASUS.

I deployed a few of these in small networks without any issues. The only issue I once had on a large deployment was that remote sites couldn't access the sharepoint server at head office over VPN until static routes were setup on the sharepoint server for each remote site. Everything else worked fine so we suspected it was probably actually a fault with our sharepoint server (was an ancient unsupported version still running on win2k).