My dearest PF Sense Support Mailinglist, I have some things I want to achieve with the help of PF Sense and I am not quite sure if this a) make sense and b) is possible with our technical set up. Nevertheless I am also looking for somebody that could help us with further developing a package for pf sense and open sourcing it, if that would help our needs. But anyway, let's get started:
We do run a coworking space in berlin (www.betahaus.de) wich host around 120 coworkers and is running on a pfSense 1.2.2. as the heart of the Wifi and Lan infrastructur. We basically do only have Wifi APs from Linksys (WRT 54 GL) running on OpenWRT. Our Users book their plan (weekly, monthly or part time desks) via paypal subscription or handish (they just pay cash) To ease up usermanagement and billing issues, we would love to have the following features: - a captive portal solution that prompts you to either authenticate or signup for a monthly plan on paypal or similar if you open your laptop and connect to the WLAN. - an API that hand over Ids of users that are logged on , e.g. are situated inside the coworking space, so that you can check out how is present (of course only if the agreed earlier!) - an API that hands over some activity data to play around with on our external website (e.g. total users online, location of users inside the building/access point wise, downstream, upstream, anonymous voip traffic, whatever makes sense,) With my knowledge which is limited it seems that for the furst bullet point we just need to make a radius server check with paypal if the users has paid his plan and at what schedule he is allowed to work at our coworking space. the rest is done by the captive portal function of the pfsense, I guess. But still I am not an expert and maybe there are smarter ways to conduct what I have in mind. I would be very glad to get some hints into the right direction and would be happy if we could get closer to a good solution. I you happen to be in Berlin anyway just pass by betahaus at Moritzplatz to have a chat about it. We are open all day and serve good coffee... ;) Cheers Christoph
