Offering public free wifi - any suggestions

-Mike-

-Mike-

-Mike-

Soldato
Joined
22 Dec 2002
Posts
10,165
Location
Minehead
Hey all,

Having long since retired a pfsense box, am looking at public wifi options that will provide the logging/adhere to the various legislations that seem to shadow offering such a service now.

Two that seem to come up in a quick google search are cucumber tony/kazalia and purple wifi.

Does anyone have any experience with either for a reasonable client load? I'm trying to make sure it won't fall over on a saturday when the potential for a high number of clients is quite high.

Thanks!
 
dlite said:
If you think running a router separately is an option, check out unifi accesspoints. PoE might even make placenent nicer.

Arstechnica has a nice review:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015...-realize-how-terrible-consumer-wi-fi-gear-is/

They are great tools for solivng your problem, but are sold as such, you still need to set them up yourself and configure etc. Not ready made product for your issue.
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We've got a couple of ubiquiti installed already, probably headed towards a mikrotik as a gateway router for them just wondering if we're missing a trick somewhere or another service :)
 
What was wrong with pfsense that made you retire it? Was it not capable of delivering the required service or something?
 
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Rozzy85 said:
What was wrong with pfsense that made you retire it? Was it not capable of delivering the required service or something?
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I found it fantastic, but I don't believe it offers the accounting required by all the legislation over public WiFi. The box was fast, obviously far more powerful than any regular stuff but the drives failed after five years of service and they want it replacing as a whole :(
 
Thanks, so if the Secretary of State doesn't write to you and inform you that you need to keep the information then there's no onus on one to collect the information?

And to stop unwanted behaviour, you could block torrenting and use safe DNS servers such as open dns's filtering?

Just wondering out loud really as I've heard about this before but never seen it written in stone that you must do x, y and z and I'm just doing the above.
 
tribz said:
Thanks, so if the Secretary of State doesn't write to you and inform you that you need to keep the information then there's no onus on one to collect the information?

And to stop unwanted behaviour, you could block torrenting and use safe DNS servers such as open dns's filtering?

Just wondering out loud really as I've heard about this before but never seen it written in stone that you must do x, y and z and I'm just doing the above.
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This is how I also understand it, and if that's the case pfsense will offer the solution you need most probably :)
 
I'd stick with a managed service unless there's a good reason not to.

If you're in the hospitality business then the chances are you'll be too busy to properly manage a homebrewed solution.
 
bremen1874 said:
I'd stick with a managed service unless there's a good reason not to.

If you're in the hospitality business then the chances are you'll be too busy to properly manage a homebrewed solution.
Click to expand...

It worked quite well to be fair, was very stable but the drive kicking the bucket did it no favours ;)
 
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