Rental Home Wireless Networks? 57
Tangential asks: "I'm looking for advice. I have a rental home at the beach that I've equipped with Cable Modem and WiFi. After trying to use it with WEP for a summer I gave that up (life is far too short for me to talk every renter thru configuring their notebook). I would like a bit of control over who uses my system. I've blocked outbound port 25 (since my ISP doesn't), but what I'd really like to do is run something like hotels do, where you enter a password and activate your MAC address for a certain amount of time, Then I could just tell the renter the password and manage that remotely. I run OSS in my Linksys WRT-54G router at home (from Sveasoft) and I like being able to use a low cost router for such a function. I'd like to know what systems other folks have encountered that do this using OSS and mass market equipment."
Hassle (Score:5, Insightful)
My project, macf (Score:5, Insightful)
A few years ago, I wrote the skeleton for this sort of thing. It was for a job, the guy never did the paperwork to hire me, so I stopped working on it and put my code on Sourceforge. It worked; I just hadn't polished anything. (The management interface, in particular, sucked.) It pretty much requires FreeBSD to use as your filter box.
The basic architecture is like this. First, there's a management interface that's just some PHP scripts talking to a MySQL database. That's how you add leases, how long you want them to last, etc. You could also add the leases to the database using any other means you want.
A daemon is running that frequently sweeps the database and reconfigures the kernel part (described in a minute). The daemon expires old leases, adds new leases, etc. It also watches the traffic (passively, so the traffic isn't going through the daemon) and logs usage stats. (This last was part of the spec the original customer gave me.)
The kernel part is what actually does the filtering. This doesn't need any custom kernel modules or anything; it's just a netgraph node inbetween the interfaces you're filtering on that uses the built-in BPF netgraph driver. (In those days, the packet filters in FreeBSD didn't support MAC filtering.)
Anyway, like I said, it all works-- or at least did when I wrote it, and I don't see any reason that anything would have broken seriously. Check it out; it's macf on SourceForge [sourceforge.net].
Re:D-Link Airspot Line of Wireless Routers. (Score:1, Insightful)
Do you realize how many computers you could buy for one of these things?
"Seems a little pricey"