[plug] Internet Kiosk/Gateway

[Craig Foster]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: plug-bounces at plug.org.au [mailto:plug-bounces at plug.org.au] On
> Behalf Of Tim White
> Sent: Friday, 25 January 2008 7:16 PM
> To: plug at plug.org.au
> Subject: [plug] Internet Kiosk/Gateway
> 
> 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).

Cheat.

Chillispot does what you require.
 
> 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.

Honestly?

Linksys WRT54GL + DD-WRT using VLAN, Chillispot, P2P blocking,
Transparent Proxy for starters, and because you can put the WRT the
other side of the wall, you have physical security and network
separation as well.

And the beauty is it's linux inside, complete with the ability add
scripts to startup (including iptables extras).

> 
> Thanks
> 
> Tim
> 
> _______________________________________________

This is in place at a few schools, but they're being replaced with full
Cisco kit as the system worked so well but only covered a small part of
the campus ^_^

CraigF.