Hotspot for dialup

[troy]

I've been doing some reasearch into building out a WiFi network, and stumbled into this forum, which got me thinking...

Is there any reason I couldn't stick a StarOS router between my dialup servers and gateway router to take advantage of the Hotspot features for my dialup platform?

What I'm thinking, is that I would set my dialup equipment to accept /all/ connections, regardless of username/password used. From there, the connection would go through the StarOS router, and be subject to the captive portal, requiring the user to log in before he/she could do anything else.

I can see several benifits of doing something like this, though I don't know that StarOS can actually do them (yet):

1) Assign different firewall rules per user, offering different levels of protection and access.
2) Require the user to use a proxy server (for parental controls)
3) Prevent the user from using a proxy server (dialup accelerator)
4) Allow inactive customers to pay their bill and give them a 24 hour window until their payment can be verified.
5) ...

TIA,

-Troy

[cal361]

I was thining abot something like that years ago, but the I realized that depending on your dial up equipment you can already do this with your good friend RADIUS.

Portmasters can use RADIUS and ChoiceNet to set options like you are describing.

With Lucent/Ascend MAX equipment you can use the Ascend-Data-Filter attribute.

Or, if you actually run your own POPs, with both solutions you could just create a new RADIUS group that assigns private address space and gives them a DNS server with a wildcard TLD that forces all lookups to resolve to an internal webserver (or proxy) that allows them to pay up!

This is all much less trouble for the end user. I mean, would you like to be forced to log in twice?

Either way you are going to be creating multiple RADIUS groups and you may as well make it easy on the end user. :)

[funkywizard]

i would rather use hotspot myself. you had better back up that dns setting with a firewall setting as well or you're in for problems. My college had a registration page that was easily circumvented by just changing your dns servers from "get automatically" to a known good server.

[cal361]

Please note:
"that assigns private address space"

Meaning you use a RADIUS profile to assign a private address space with no path to the Internet. No need for a firewall.

However Ascend-Data-Filter and or ChoiceNet settings could be used for a firewall as I presented.