Hotspot with no Radius?

[jasonepowell]

Is there any way to use the Hotspot functionality without Radius? We don't have or want a Radius server on our network (we don't use Hotspots generally) but we need to be able to redirect all initial web requests to a certain page (a registration page) and then would allow the user to surf the web.

We have a one time event coming up Wednesday which we are scrambling to meet deadlines on. If Staros can do this, I will buy a Server license tomorrow.

[lonnie]

Redirecting them to a page does not do any good. They have to enter proper information and have that authenticated, otherwise you are simply running an open system and collecting user info that has no chance of being truthful.

You are responsible for traffic and the only way you can be safe is to know who is using your system. Imagine the next big worm shows up and is traced to your system and the registration info you have is for a user called biteme and his password was takeoff. Do you think the authorities will simply say "Oh well, you don't know who it was. Too bad".

An ISP has a responsibility in today's situation to run a secure network. That means authentication and the easiest and most universal is radius.

[jasonepowell]

In this case, we just wanted to redirect the initial load of a web browser to an internal web server so that we could advertise our services the first time only.

What we ended up doing is loading NoCatAuth in open mode which basically throws up our web page, and then there's a button that says "Click here to continue surfing the web" and off they go. We would never dream of having a permanent hotspot with no authentication, for sure.

[lonnie]

In that case simply modify the sign-in page to give the username as demo and password as demo, and set the radius to have that user name and password.

You could even go as far as having several user accounts with different speeds so they could check the possibilities.