Thanks for the great comparison, Butch. You and I talked a couple of years ago about Gatespot.
I did some searching and actually ran across some Gatespot systems in use. I then spoke to the operators of them. None of them seemed to use it heavily and not really for the type of use we have, and to be quite honest, the screens I saw were pretty unimpressive. Mostly just a blank page with some fill-in blocks in an odd looking font- very similar to the Gatespot demo pages. I don't say that ours (which are a template from Wireless Orbit) are works of art, but they aren't bad and they are easy to customize ourselves. I don't doubt that is can be very customizable and heard lots of great comments about Eje and his support and eagerness to help, but also I heard that most customization HAD to be done by him. Maybe that user just didn't want to do the php code? That's OK, as long as Eje's available, but it sort of locks us into a corner- especially if we have a need that is more immediate than he can support. I would love to see a Gatespot application where the owner has done some customization and has really nice looking screens for the customer side. Butch, if you can help us find a user who has really got a good example of Gatespot in use, please help us make contact. For those systems who actually put the login templates on the Mikrotik instead of redirecting like Wireless Orbit does, I saw some very nice ones on the MT forum. Of course no one helps out by sharing their code. We have one location where we provide a public free access 35 AP Tropos Muni-Mesh run by a Mikrotik hotspot. It uses the Mikrotik "trial" login feature with some code change to hide the signup part and just require a click acceptance of terms and conditions. I wrote the initial page and embedded the MT "secret sauce" and then gave it to the customer's web designer. They then applied the organization's "look and feel" and the thing came out looking darn nice! They even made a mobile version for phones. It is a great success. Incidentally, it uses Mikrotik's "cookies" to allow the users to revisit with their devices up to 30 days later and use the system without having to even see the splash page. Perfect for Cellular data offload for these folks. At the moment there are 2715 cookies issued. Thanks, Ralph Brightlan -----Original Message----- From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Butch Evans Sent: Saturday, March 23, 2013 12:05 AM To: WISPA General List Subject: Re: [WISPA] Hotspot/Billing/AAA options? On Fri, 2013-03-22 at 20:07 -0400, ralph wrote: > Anyone using DMA Softlabs RADIUS Manager for their hotspots? I have a few customers using that software. It's decent, but it is a bear to install and set up unless you use the precise versions he recommends. Last time I looked, it was an older version of Freeradius, but I seem to recall that he has updated to use FreeRadius 2.x. > How about the Gatespot system that Butch sells? This is actually software written by Eje of Wisp-Router. It is by far the most flexible system I've ever seen. > (I spoke on the phone to a couple of Gatespot users already but I > don’t think they used customized portals) It is up to you how you create the portal. It's just some php code embedded in your web page. It's very flexible. > I don’t think Mikrotik User Manager even does multiple portals, but > please let me know if you are using it for that. User Manager only allows one web page/portal per installation. -- ******************************************************************** * Butch Evans * Professional Network Consultation * * http://www.butchevans.com/ * Network Engineering * * http://store.wispgear.net/ * Wired or Wireless Networks * * http://blog.butchevans.com/ * ImageStream, Mikrotik and MORE! * * 702-537-0979 * ******************************************************************** _______________________________________________ Wireless mailing list Wireless@wispa.org http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless _______________________________________________ Wireless mailing list Wireless@wispa.org http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
