Re: [LUG] Hotel Logging in Management

Hi Guys

Thanks for all the replies. Just to fill in some more details. The hotel has 50+ rooms and wants a form that allows the user to enter the wifi password and their email address. The email address to capture usage. This is both because of the law and also because of unauthorised access. Quite how they're going to monitor it I don't know.

I am using this as a project for a young secondary lad who is exploring computer options. He has recently put a distro of Linux on his laptop and was very impressed.

Thanks for all the help.

Rich

On 11 June 2013 09:24, Grant Phillips-Sewell <dcglug@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 11 June 2013 06:41, Simon Avery <digdilem@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

As a very occasional user of such things; please provide it free to use. Password nailed up in reception or in the room. Some bandwidth may be useful if there are many guests. Wifi is the FIRST thing I look for when booking a room. If it's not mentioned and free, I go elsewhere.

Strongle suggest avoiding the commercial outsourcing partners. They may do it for free, but they will milk the customer. See Travelodge (an extra £10-£15 per 24 hours (?)) and Premier Inn (something like £6 per night). Registration and key cards required, lots of faff. Go to a small B&B and get it for free with lower contention.

Catch and release/captive portal may be required for fully open systems where you *may* be obligated to make an effort to get personal details of the users if later the law come knocking on your door because of something they did online (IANAL, and when I did look into it was given much conflicting advice and walked away more confused than before I started looking).

However, hotels already have that, so why require it again and frustrate the guests? I rate hotels lower that provide crap/restricted wifi online via the booking agencies, and most owners consider online reviews critical so why take the risk?

(On a practical level, multiple waps are probably inevitable, but no special setup needed)

If the hotel in question has only a fairly limited number of rooms, then would it not be plausible to create a transparent proxy that is password protected, has a limited number of password - one for each room/guest - which could be generated/tied in with the booking details? It wouldn't even need to be particularly fancy - just a record of "this password was for this room on this date", so it could cleanly tie-in with their existing room records.

Grant.

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