Free Hotel Tyoe of Hotspot

xtreme09

n00b
Joined
Mar 16, 2005
Messages
17
I need a suggestion on creating a hotspot for my office. I would like to create an open and free hotspot.
Only thing is, if someone wants to connect I need them to have to enter a new passcode each time. I have seen similar things at Hotels where you can connect to an open wireless network though when you try to connect to a website it redirects you to their own webpage where you must call the concierge and obtain a unique passcode to have access to the internet.
I have heard of ChilliFire firmware that you can install on a lot of routers but I have not had much luck with obtaining the end result i am looking for.
Does anyone have any suggestions?
 
I'm a fan of pfSense, a FreeBSD based router/firewall distribution. They also have a captive portal which could support what you are looking for. That would provide you quite control on what's going on over your wifi. Depend on the jurisdiction you are in you might be fully responsible on the content; so good to have a nice logging.

I never used this function; would be interessting to hear your experience in case you give it a shot.
 
UniFi WAPs have a captive portal that you can configure and manage bandwidth, throughput cap, etc.
Then you can use whatever you want as a router - but I would still recommend pfSense if you don't have anything in place already.
 
Chillispot and other hotspot features built into DD-WRT can do it as well.
 
Since this is a small office with about 10-15 wireless users at a peak time, I have resorted to using a TP-LINK 1043nd router along with ChilliFire firmware to handle QoS and Voucher based guest wifi services.
ChilliFire have been somewhat responsive when running into configuration problems. They do support a large host of routers although I found their firmware to be buggy one a few routers (we bricked 2 routers using their firmware).
I do not believe a non tech savvy user could have configured ChilliFire at all - very easy to mess up.
I also have a secondary Linksys WRT54GL running the same firmware as a redundant wifi network.
We have an faster connection to the network which is wired - this wired network is a seperate vlan which people have to pay to use.
A future solution would also be to use Pfsense although I would have needed to set aside an actual computer system for this instead of a simple $40 router. Pfsense offers endless possibilities.
Thank you for the suggestions:)
 
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