Rental Home Wireless Networks?

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."

Keep in mind..

[SocialEngineer]

Things like that aren't guaranteed - if you need to ensure that no user is using it for bittorrent, or anything like that, you might as well give up :)

For instance, if you leave port 22 open, your users will be able to set up a socks proxy through SSH [the-engine.org] (requires a box available on the 'net with SSH tunneling privs, but that isn't hard to get). If you have that blocked, but have ping open, well.. They'd have to have another box on the outside with admin privs, but they could also tunnel all the traffic through ping (I've seen it done before, never tried it myself).

You probably won't have to worry about the tenants doing this, but always be wary of wardrivers who are looking to leech some wifi.

If the benefits outweight the risks, go for it.

On the right track..

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe that Sveasoft (or somebody else) has a firmware for the WRT54G which will act like a "coffeeshop" type distro. Generate passwords, etc. Keep looking at the firmware.

Post Google:

http://www.portless.net/menu/ewrt/ [portless.net]

and look into software called "nocatauth", which the above has put on a WRT54G

Luck

Re:On the right track..

[SillyNickName4me]

For people who have some Linux knowledge, I'd suggest looking into OpenWRT [openwrt.org] with Chilispot.

It basicly provides you with all you need for running a hotspot without bothering your users with new software or different settings. User connects, is directed to a webpage where they have to login, and everything works..