Introduction
My boss gave me this project which I am not directly qualified for but have put significant # of hours studying up on. He owns a medium sized webhosting company and recently bought a lakehouse in the middle of nowhere, the only internet in the area is satellite. The area has a ton of trees and LOS on an entire house is virtually impossible, also while the community is a couple miles across there are a number of ridges and small valleys that from our house we only have LOS on about 1/4 to 1/2 mile of residents. I have hired an internet company to bring a T1 connection out to the house, now too offset the cost we will be reselling the connection to the neighbors. Initially LOS from his house we expect to have 10 customers (.25mile radius, 180degree) initially before we setup a couple repeaters on the following ridges and we should have a max of 200 houses, let’s say about 400 people. Of course we will expand the T1 line as we need to. Personally, I’m good at learning as I go but since it isn’t my money I want to have all my knowledge squared away before I start purchasing everything.
Purpose
We want a setup that will be either able to support the 400 person maximum or be expandable up to that point. I’m sure the 450G can’t handle that much load, but initially we would only have 10-30 people. I have a number of questions but I suppose I will branch this off into a few different topics, for each question string.
Question
Would you recommend a RADIUS server for this application? I have experience with php/mysql development and can put together a basic portal but would I need to setup an apache server on the router as well or how does that work? any howto links?
I would like customers to be able to sign up and get RADIUS access completely through the portal and we can hook in any web based signup process and account creation just like we do for the web hosting company - is that possible with RouterOS? any howto links?
(less related) can we throttle certain ports? (for example leave 80 un-throttled but cap the p2p ports)
Any other cool things RouterOS can do that I should know about for our project?
Thank you very much for your help, we really appreciate it!
alright, so I now understand the difference between a radius server and a radius client. the RouterOS only acts as a compliant so all these questions would be for OpenRadius boards. Thanks anyways for your time.
Right, but how could a 450G support 400 users? You didn’t read the rest of my questions or information.
Thank you for confirming that I will need a RADIUS server. But is UserManager some software that comes on the RouterOS? Can it be linked into some sort of portal where customers can sign up and authenticate through a website they reach after connecting to the wireless network (such as at airports, starbucks, etc)?
UserManager is a package that can be installed on RouterOS. Of caurse if RB450 will handle 400 users depends on other configuration and how much BW it will have to push through.
If you intend to run UserManager, Queues, firewall and mangle then I suggest soemthing more powerful RB1100 or x86.
If you are looking for an all in one solution for Radius, billing, web page access etc, you can take a look at this as a potential solution. http://myinnsite.com/
There are a few other similar options posted around the forums, so a search would dig up a few other options. This is the other one I’ve seen brought up on the forums here and there. http://www.dmasoftlab.com/cont/home
If you don’t want to pay for a solution to handle those portions for you, you are looking at using the various open source options out there and piecing together your own solution.
Thanks, this is the information that I was looking for!
It’s great to know there are these softwares out there, we might use it but we might not - we run a webhosting company (30,000+ customers) billing systems aren’t anything new to us
Radius billing != web hosting billing
You could also take a look at Yfi hotspot manager. I’ve been playing with it some months ago and if I didn’t have a solution yet, I sure would use it. (it’s opensource and free available) http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/hotcakes/wiki/WikiStart
