I am in the process of starting a wide area WISP.
My RB1100 should be here tomorrow.
First question:
Is it possible to configure the unit to accept payments from merchants other than Authorize and Paypal?
I am in the UK and Authorize.net don’t support us.
Is the built in radius server ok? - What is the advantage of having a 3rd party billing system?
I am currently leaning towards www.hotspotsystem.com as it will save me colocating another server in the data centre.
So it looks like I need to go down the Radius Manager route I’m guessing!?
I was hoping not as my system is in a datacentre so I will need to purchase extra rack space along with a server to run it.
I have our Usermanager running on a VPS. What makes you think it might not?
Contact me direct if you need any assistance with setting up a hotspot system in the UK. We have some experience of the ‘delights’ of using PayPal and Usermanager as a solution!
I’ve been looking at the Radius Manager software, I think it runs off the back of FreeRadius.
I contacted the company that make Radius Manager I they outlined that their license ties to the mac address of the server.
I’m basically looking for an easy to use accounting and billing system.
How did you guys get around it? - I’d really love to have a third party merchant account.
They use ioncube to encrypt the php, that is why it is locked to the mac address. So if you want to run a hot swap backup server - make sure it either has a NIC with the same mac address, use a NIC card you can swap over or use a virtual server (my choice).
The accounting and billing side is fine.
How did we get around what? PayPal’s annoying “features”? We’ve learnt that we are not a customer of PayPal, are treated like a dodgy ‘back street’ shop by PayPal and the customer will always get their money back, either because PayPal “thinks” we have not posted them anything when the customer raises a dispute with them (usually due to PayPal’s site getting blocked by Mikrotik’s Hotspot walled garden system).
We have tried to argue many times to PayPal that as a WISP, selling internet access time, we do not post anything. But they just don’t understand it. We send them internet access logs to show the customer got all their internet time and what they paid for, they got, but they still re-imburse their/our customer, even if the customer does not want the money back and have also stated to PayPal that they are happy and have received the access time. I’ve lost count of the number of times we have received cash or cheques in the post because they also cannot understand why they got the money returned to their card, feel guilty about getting something for nothing and send us the money ‘again’.
We had a major problem up until last year where every now and again, half way through the payment process, the Mikrotik hotspot would block all access to PayPal, give the potential new customer a ‘page cannot be found’ and no matter where they try to go to on PayPal’s website, it would be blocked until they started the whole process again. But of course, they can’t use their freshly created UserManager account, as Usermanager has a ‘feature’ where if the payment process has still not yet been finished it disallows the new client from logging into their account and adding a payment in case of such a failure, claiming their account does not exist. You can imagine the frustration!
We’ll only know for sure next year if the solution we have put in place will work (to fix PayPal being blocked), as our hotspots are mainly used by Marina visitors to the Island and that will not really kick off until the warmer weather, in the Spring. Our winter users are mainly long term payment customers living in houses/flats within range of the hotspot area and they usually pay for 6 months or 1 year. So the number of PayPal usage through the winter is nearly nil.
We made a start to edit the web page templates - but found they still don’t change the basic physical layout just the colours/fonts and content of each cell in each table - the basic tables were hard coded. We really struggled with the top and bottom images they use for a start! We could have delved deeper and deeper into the coding to try and make something of it, but obviously after finding out the technical problems regarding the billing business model not being suited to hotspots that I’ve already listed above - we lost interest taking this much further!
Now if we operated a WISP in the same way as an ISP, with fixed term clients where they get cut off clients at midnight, it might be worth continuing. But as our Hotspots are based on a purchased ‘period of time after first logon’ and not ‘usage time’, Radius manager won’t work for us.
Sounds like I’m wasting my time going any further with it.
I’d be interested to hear what route you took.
Can I contact you directly.?
At the moment I’m using a captive portal server setup with a bridge between two sites, And an engenius mesh wlan on each site, but I would like to use mikrotik kit with a centralised radius server.
I thought I would post this question on here as I’m sure I won’t be the first to ask it.
I think I’m going to go down the MikroTik User Manager route as I think it will cover what I need. I’m keen to run this on a virtual server as you are…mainly because if my router fails I can just hot swap it without the worry of losing the accounts.
I have the RB1100, to install User Manager on the VPS what version of the OS / License do I need to buy? Also, any suggestions on where to purchase it?
To create a virtual image based UM Server, you will need the x86 image. I suggest purchasing a Level6 license unless you will only be dealing with a very small number of customers.
