newbie question for hotspots

[sligbot]

I'm interested in getting a real simple hotspot system up and running. I'm right now using the router version of StarOS, so it doesn't have the Radius server on it, although my working system does have it(using server addition); I'm just not using it.
I know there is a ton available about Radius setup to read, and I'm doing that right now, but I'm wondering about what the best rout to take... I'm thinking of either the following systems:
1. StarOS(router) -> Win2K (running IAS/Radius) -- vai LAN
OR
2. StarOS(router) -> StarOS(server running Radius) -- via Net
I like the first option but I'd like to hear if that's a better option than the 2cnd. I know the best option is probably neither as I should get my hands dirtier with Linux and run a Linux-based Radius program but I learn in baby-steps...
Thansk in advance

[lonnie]

For now our radius server is very basic. We provide it for small operations and it does not do anything but authentication.

If you have accounting, reporting, and control needs then you should be looking at one of the many radius servers that exist. There are guys who do for radius what we do for Access Points.

[jlawrence]

OK, I know I use linux all the time. But I'd never setup a radius server before.
Following the info in the O'Reilly radius book, I had FreeRadius up and running in no time. A quick hack to produce a sign up page and a couple of quick scripts to expire users and it all had a MySQL backend.
This all took less than half a day to setup - made much easier with the introduction of the whitelist.

If you can read the O'Reilly book, then you can get it running fairly quickly and painlessly. One day I'll even get around to typing up my notes - which should form a reasonably straight forward howto.

Alternatively I'd go with option 2 for a quick and simple hotspot - it's exactly what we used to prove hotspots worked before sorting out our own Radius server.

[georgew]

You should put in the radius accounting collector, and pipe it's output into the remote syslog target. That way you can provide access to the data and not have to do anything more to complete the basic radius server.