Help setting up a hotspot

[TGA]

Hi all, I have a project I am working on and I was hoping some of you might be willing and able to help me out. The project consists of setting up a hotspot/internet café to be part of a new store that is opening up at the Mall. Incase anyone cares and before I go any further let me just say this is not for profit. I am not getting paid to set this up. Also the store is providing the service free of charge. The store that is doing this will be selling portable personal devices. Cell phones, PDA’s, MP3 players, Digital cameras, and so on.

Anyway, motives and basics aside now let me get in to some detail. We will have 3 or 4 computers setup that people can come in and use. Securing them is another topic for later so I won’t get in to any more detail, other then that they will be hard wired not wireless. We will have seating for about 20 or so more people in the store and there are benches set up in the Mall just out side the store for about 10 more people. Those are the 2 areas that we would like to provide wireless service to.

I have not been able to obtain what sort of internet connection we will have but I am under the impression it will be some sort of fractional T1. Bandwidth will have to be limited but I haven’t been able to decide how much to give each connection. I would love to find a way to set it up so they get a burst of speed for checking email and loading web pages but still have it limited when they are trying to download something else. I also want all P2P and such services blocked.

So I am looking for suggestions on hardware and software for this setup. What I am planning to do is something like this. Use an off the shelf router to handle the connection where it comes in. From there I want to split it up with two old computers running one of the Linux based firewalls. One of them will manage the business network while the other manages the public hotspot.

I am still doing my homework on this project and I will update this thread as I progress. I have about 3 month before the store will be ready to open. I would like to start testing on this in no more then 4-6 weeks. So I don’t have a lot of time to decide on what hardware and software I am going to need. This is why I am turning to you guys hoping to get some assistance. I know I am going to need at least a few weeks with the help of my friends to test the reliability and security of the network, so the sooner I can get all the pieces together the better.

Thanks for tanking the time to read this and I appreciate any advice.

 

[Malk-a-mite]

m0n0wall
- Captive portal
http://www.m0n0.ch/wall/

EDIT:

I need to be more wordy at times, if you want any decent branding of the hotspot you need to look into some type of captive portal that will present a particular webpage prior to given unrestricted access to the net. You can also use it to have people register for the service or whatever else you think they should do. At this time it does not appear that Endian does this - so you might have to hack out the feature yourself if you decide it's something like client wants.

 

[atomiser]

you shouldn't need to run an off-the-shelf router and then two old pc's as linux router/firewalls... if linux router/firewalls are your thing you should just be able to get away with running a single instance of it (with more nics providing you multiple security zones) on one newer more pokey desktop pc connected directly to your internet connection. you may even be able to pick up a reasonable server (pci slots dependant) and run it on there... at least that way you would have hardware redundancy built in. there are (i think) plenty of mods available for the linux router/firewall distributions that should enable you to lock everything down as you need to. yeoldestonecat seems pretty stoked with endian which i think is ipcop+copfilter+a few others... are you going to use a linux distribution for the desktop pc's too? youll also need a few switches i guess - i can recommend the hp procurve line, they're excellent. other people seem to rave about some of the business class linksys products too, though i have never used them.

 

[thedude42]

check this out:

less networks

They did their own linux distru that does one thing: creates a captive portal for wireless access using no-cat auth.

They are part of the Austin Wireless City project which aimed at edging out the Tmobile/Starbucks type of access through the city by supporting this kind of solution at any popular location/venue willing to set up the hot spot, and did very well at it.

There should be a guide on how to alter the config so it authenticates through your own system, but out of the box this distro is configured to authenticate through their own list of registered users. but, since you're not doing this with any intention of a pay service, you could simply jump on the less networks bandwagon, as they exist in a few countries and cities, witht he majority being in Austin, Texas.

 

[TGA]

Thanks for the suggestions guys. I forgot to mention that we want people to have to register with us before using the service. I will check out the suggested software when I get home.

I was under the impression that a separate firewall for the business side would provide a bit more security. I don’t know how much more and it may very well be overkill. I will run the first tests on the setup using just one nix based firewall and see how it goes.

Oh and no the computers that will be set up for public use are going to run XP Home. I had to move the store computers over to XP Pro because of some new inventory software they got. So they have like 4 XP home licenses just sitting around doing nothing.