Hi, I have been trying to find out if user manager supports this feature, but can’t really figure it out. I’m hoping somebody can shine some light on it for me.
If I have 5 hotspots all authenticating back to one central MT box running user manager, what is the best way to separate those users so that they can only login to the hotpspot where they bought their time from ?
I have tried to see how it could work with different customer names for each hotspot, but can’t figure out how I tell a hotspot which customer name it is, then I thought about the public ID’s, but I can’t really understand how that is of any use at the user level.
Oh, that’s a shame.
Why I want to do it is that some of the hotspots have conference centres, and the customers want to use the hotspot for the conference centre access as well as the public hotspot use, but they don’t want somebody to use their public hotspot if they got given time for free at another conference centre. You see the conference centres give away hotspot time 8 hours at a time, whereas at the public hotspots customers pay for 1 hour at a time, we just need to try and separate the user accounts between conference centres and public access without having to manage different ID’s for each, but still being able to control them all with one user manager system.
Thanks for the idea Sergejs, I’ll give that a try.
I did try to create a second subscriber the other day, but once I created it I couldn’t log in through the user manager web interface.
I’ll try again and test what you suggest, I think that might just work !
Sergejs, I set everything up ready to go, added multiple subscribers, added users in each one, and all seemed to be OK. This is how I set it up.
One subscriber called “PUBLIC”, 2 other subscribers called “CUST1” and “CUST2”. PUBLIC is for all public paying customers, CUST1 and CUST2 are for conference centres who only want the conference related cards they hand out to be used at their hotspot, but are happy for PUBLIC cards to be used at either because the customer would have paid full price for the card rather than a free or discounted price as part of a conference.
The issue here is that if I setup CUST1 in usermanager to accept connections from CUST1HOTSPOT (router), then I can’t authenticate PUBLIC users as well because you can only add a router to one subscriber.
Thanks for the suggestion.
After spending another 6 hours trying everything I could think of I found a good solution.
What I have done is created all users under 1 subscriber, but for each user I have defined a group name within them. This group name matches hotspot user profiles on the router. So, if user 1 has a group name of public, I would setup the hotspot to have 2 groups, public and conference. So if the user logs into that hotspot, their group would be read an they would be logged in using the public user profile.
Obviously only the conference centre hotspot would have the user profile called conference, so if a user tried to login at another hotspot and their group was conference, the conference user profile would not exist so they would get a configuration error on the hotspot login page and would not be allowed to login. To make it a bit more information I modified errors.txt to customise the particular error so the user knows that the error they get is because they are not permitted to login to the hotspot with that user ID.
So what I will do is for hotspots that want to lock certain users to them, I will create a public user profile and a specific one for their site, then when I allocate user ID’s to them, I will give them ones specific for their site and generic ones able to be used at any hotspot.
This solution gives me the added bonus of being able to treat specific users for that site differently by using the different user profiles which will be quite handy.
Thanks for all the help.
If anybody need more info about this just reply to this post.