[plug] Looking for Hotspot Distro/Software

[Leon Brooks]

On Wednesday 11 January 2006 09:16, Shannon Carver wrote:
> What software was it using? Or was it in-house stuff?

In-house, web-based on PHP and PostgreSQL. It basically created a 
temporary login for a new user (operator printed out a 
username/password pair), and the WM was run through a stub which did 
the accounting and exited (killing the session) when the time ran out. 
There was also a Ruby applet which lived in the systray and displayed 
the time remaining. Everything is geared to "failure or tampering == 
die and log out".

The same login can be used on two stations at once, but of course eats 
time twice as fast. IIRC, the quantum was 10 seconds.

Retargeting it for wireless (or UTP sockets, perhaps using a manageable 
switch) would mean choosing a security mechanism ("must leave a browser 
window running somewhere", for example, tied to a card's MAC address; 
or with a higher-end WAP, an encryption key) that didn't involve 
running anything special on the client machines, but the accounting and 
timing need not change.

Cheers; Leon

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