[plug] Internet Kiosk/Gateway

[Tim White]

The organisation I'm with atm, is looking at providing students with 
Internet access. But we require that it's similar to an Internet kiosk 
(hotspot), so that we can take payments, and give them a usage limit (in 
data, not time), as well as providing filtering.

Basically, I'm looking for a hotspot/kiosk manager for Linux, that 
obviously integrates with a proxy and iptables (we need to give them 
transparent proxy access, and msn/VoIP/IRC...). The proxy is basically 
just for URL based filtering, as well as simple caching to speed up the 
connection marginally (here in South Africa, most Internet access is via 
Wireless).

I'm yet to see the machine it'll be running on, but it's most likely 
going to be a single NIC, with the router on the physical network (so if 
they configured their own machine, they could bypass the system), but 
all the machines that will be going through the kiosk gateway will be 
assigned via DHCP, with the kiosk gateway as their default route. (So 
the kiosk gateway could actually have 2 subnets on the same NIC, or have 
the client machines on half the subnet, and the router on the other 
half, I'm yet to work all those details out).

Any suggestions to prebuilt packages for this, or how to easily set this 
up? My basic thoughts to using it are like wireless hotspots. DHCP your 
network settings, then login into a web interface to obtain access to 
the network. A nice feature would also allow you to set a MAC address 
for your login, that alleviates the need for the web interface login.

Thanks

Tim