I was wondering if I could let a accounting program (or rightly the teller machine) create a user in some form of a database, and let the user manager read it over the LAN on a Windows computer…?
The idea is that a customer buys HotSpot time and the teller machine simply writes the new user in a database that the user manager could then access and grant access to the customer.
This would eliminate the need to have to log into the User manager and create the user there, also less danger of a mistake.
The access code could then be on the customers receipt.
If I understand you well, the teller machine or the window based computer will generate the ticket and keep in its database!
If Yes, Then what do you want the User Manager to do?
Give details so that we can understand exactly what you want to achieve.
The register has a touchscreen, the products can simply be taped via finger…
So I would like to add the product “Hotspot 1 hour or 30 minutes or whatever” and the register would write that to a database that RouterOS could then read in some way.
The register has very little processing power so running a RADIUS server would not be optional, but the database could be located on another computer on the LAN.
Can the user manager database be accessed and edited directly in any way?
Currently I dont know what format the software on the register can write to.
I would consider the question “can RouterOS access any other database then the local one without an external RADIUS server?” to be the first step.
If this is a feature that RouterOS simply does not support is does not matter what database the teller machine can write to.
As I said in my first post in this thread - RouterOS, or rather User Manager, cannot access an external database of users.
The API is an interface for other applications on external servers to access RouterOS. You cannot make direct edits into the User Manager database but you can mimic CLI as if you were manually creating users that are calls that will lead to inserts.
What the POS can write to still matters because you can possibly hook that into an external RADIUS server you can use instead of User Manager, which will very most likely be significantly easier than building a solution that picks up whatever the POS outputs and uses the API to get it into the native User Manager database. And even if you use the API, the first step is still getting information from the POS terminal to the outside world so that some process can do something with that information.
Hello,
you can use Aradial Radius server. We are using the Aradial Hotspot solutions with our Mikrotik controllers.
It is a centralized Radius server supporting advanced prepaid plans as well as prepaid cards, prepaid vouchers and online credit card support.
then from any of your registers you can add the user through the dealers/resellers Web interface, add it directly to the database or use an http API to provision the user in Aradial database.
As well you can generate prepaid cards or prepaid vouchers and add them to the POS inventory and the POS can just pull a card from the pre generated cards or vouchers and add it tot he client’s receipt.