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On Wed, 12 Jun 2013, Kai Hendry wrote:
On 12 June 2013 12:37, Richard Brown <rich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: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.Since when is getting a user to enter his email address the law? I'm told by http://revk.www.me.uk/ is that as soon as offer Internet access with a contract http://www.flickr.com/photos/hendry/8658225840/ you are effectively becoming an ISP with all the trimmings. Which is bonkers. If you just have an open access point on your premises, IIUC you're not considered an ISP.
It's a huge grey area - ie. one that's not been tested yet.I've written and run captive portals in the past where we took email addresses and gave users a password - the last one which ran for 18 months on a train was really for marketing purposes than anything else. I also put caching and filtering on that service too - but that was more to save our rather expensive bandwidth than anything else - people were trying to torrent and dropbox sync - on a train with 2 x 3G connections to the outside world.
Really - just provide it for free or not at all. I would consider bandwidth control, but not firewalling. Install a dedicated line for it, so clients access doesn't go via the hotels main line(s). Stick a WPA2 password on it by all means and change it weekly, but that's just to stop freeloaders in the car park.
Oh, and tell me which hotel it is, so I can avoid it. Pay for wi-fi in a hotel these day? You've got to be joking!
And if you must have a ticketing system, go out and buy a solution, don't cobble it together with a crapppy old Linux box - there are commertial solutions. The last one I bought fo ra client cost about £450 and included the ADSL modem, wi-fi access point and a little printer with 3 buttons on it which you could program for different time durations.
Gordon
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