Hotspot-in-a-box solution

RouterOS Beginner Basics
1

Hi Guys

I’ve used RouterOS in the past for a couple of simple things, but really im a beginner.

The company i work for are looking to create a hot-spot-in-a-box solution that we can retail to clients etc. I am quite impressed with RouterOS in regards to this, but I have a couple of questions:

Firstly, to work how we would want, we would want the hotspot and user manager on the same device. According to the documentation, for this configuration you’d need a MIPS PPC or x86 system.
Is this purely a performamce thing or will it only work on this hardware? Would i be able to have this configuration on an Alix board for example, also what router board hardware would do this job?

Secondly, ideally we’d like to attach a thermal ticket printer to the device so users can quickly print out tickets without a complex web interface etc. Most of these ticket printers use serial communication. So the question is, will routeros ‘talk serial’ with a printer like this?

Thanks in advance for your help!

2

Ok so having searched the forums a bit more thouroughly it doesnt look like i can directly connect a printer to the router device.
This takes me to the next option which is to use a ticket printer atached to a computer and use the user manager webinterface to print the tickets.
I’ve not had an in depth look at user manager yet, but it looks like it might be a little too complex for the majority of our users. How easy is it to customize so, for example, you could have a custom web interface with 3 butons on it, which would print auto-generated tickets based on 3 different price plans?

3

Take a look athe the UserManager threads…

I have a solution !!