I have approx 80 locations in which I want to setup HotSpot. All internet traffic is routed to central office where they share the same internet connection.Some users roam from location to location so I don’t want to configure HotSpot in each location. It would be much more efficient to configure 1 HotSpot at central office and have the Wireless clients authenticate there.
I setup a LAB to replicate this scenario and was able to setup up my RB433->RB1000 with Hotspot on the RB1000. I created a VLAN at each end for the Wireless traffic, to isolate it from the local LAN.
Now I discovered my ISP is not provide us with a “full Layer 2” link and that I can’t pass VLANs across each link.
So I’m back to square one and I’m not sure how to proceed.
Would EoIP be an option? would it create too much traffic over my WAN? If so, how do I proceed to set that up for the Wireless network?
However, are you aware that you can have a central authentication and login page server? The benefit is that you’re not bachkhauling a bunch of traffic to the CO that the router is then going to discard - it gets thrown away locally. Also you’re not creating a giant broadcast domain where a single broadcast propagates through all the sites.
For authentication you use RADIUS, and for login pages you can redirect to an external server that is permitted in the walled garden. This is fairly easy to set up and scales to hundreds and thousands of routers, all using the same central resources.
you can also just bridge the wlan hotspot interface to a l2tp tunnel back to the main hotspot bridge. now you can make mrru on l2tp tunnel > 1500 and bridge it with ethernet interface. no ip addresses needed on the remote ap - just a bridge with l2tp tunnel and wlan interface.