Limit number of concurrent users in hotspot

RouterOS General
1

Hi there,

i want to limit the number of concurrent users in a hotspot. Lets say that only 100 Users are able to log in at the same time. Currently i didnt find any setting where i can set that.

Any ideas on how to do that?

Regards,

Joerg

2

You can only do that in user profiles:

shared-users (integer; Default: 1) Allowed number of simultaneously logged in users with the same HotSpot username

http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:IP/Hotspot/User#Properties_2

If you’re using RADIUS you can also send the Port-Limit attribute:

Port-Limit - maximal mumber of simultaneous connections using the same username (overrides te shared-users property of the HotSpot user profile)

http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:RADIUS_Client#Access-Accept

But again, that is per username. If all your users use different usernames you cannot to global limits like that. I guess you could use a level 4 license, which limits you to 200 concurrent users, but that’s twice of what you specified.

3

Hello one solution would be to use a remote radius server in my case using free-radius which I have connected to a NodeJs back end through the JSON API. whenever i have reached the number of max user if any one tries to connect I tell him/her that there is no more room to accommodate him or she and we’ll be increasing the number of possible user in the days to come (through a custom remote login page)

4

I think this is the most proper way.
I played with the same solution, but I write my backend using django.
Freeradius + rlm_rest + rest_server is a good mix.

BTW,
‘Port-Limit’ is limmiting per user concurent connection on a service port. i.e in a same hotspot-server.
If you have multiple service port (i.e multiple hotspot-server) and user can roaming … ‘port-limit’ alone didn’t give a good solution.

5

I have no experience with hotspot but recently I configured MAC authentication with RADIUS backend, and the thing I noticed is that when you set the max number of connections for each user to 1 (which is the default in user-manager which I used as a RADIUS server), the clients cannot roam between different access points anymore.
This is because when a user connects a new access point and requests access, the connection with the previous access point has not yet been properly closed, and the RADIUS server thinks the same user wants to make 2 connections, and rejects it.