[FEATURE REQ.] Easy front-office Captive Portal Accounts generation
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Hi,
first of all - thanks for this shining piece of software :)I think that a great improvement for the Captive Portal function would pass through a simpler generation of new accounts for a front-office user. The Scenario that I see is pretty much this:
A user comes along the person that runs the place (for example, a motel) where hotspots are provided. The user wants to surf the internet, so the employee prompts two offers: one is a "flat for the night" (10 EURs) that will allow the user for the range 8pm - 8am, and the other is "20h total" (15 EURs), where the user can surf for a maximum of 20 hours, in case he/she would stay more days or return to that place. The user buys one of the profiles, and the employee logs into the web interface of pfSense where he/she generates an account that is recorded in the system and then printed to a thermal printer. The receipt which helds the account informations is given to the customer.In this ideal schema, I see actually 2 things missing:
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no support for a simple account generation, based on "service profiles" defined by the system manager
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no simple way to pass the credentials to the user
The idea of ticket printing was taken from a RayTalk Hotspot (http://www.raytalk.com/Product.aspx?oid=a7e596fe-07fa-4e35-a7d7-4b966b4ddba8) that I tried - it makes your life 10k times simpler. By the way, printing to a thermal printer is simple as dumping a sequence of raw characters to a /dev/something peripheral - and that's really all.
So… is this a "shared view" or am I quite off the way? :D Personally I think that something that would get pfSense closer to my scenario could be the only real alternative to many commercial systems.
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So… is this a "shared view" or am I quite off the way? Cheesy Personally I think that something that would get pfSense closer to my scenario could be the only real alternative to many commercial systems.
I think it's a bit outdated.
1. I would want it for free if/when I would rent a room.
2. Most ppl traveling on the road every day would have 3G or GPRS
3. I would think it would be a very individual feature/setup from a design point.Never the less if you need it. This thread might be a good starting point.
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,14847.msg78500.html#msg78500 -
1. I would want it for free if/when I would rent a room.
"For free" it's a billing of 0, which would be provided from the custom business profiles, so that's no problem. What matters is that a visitor can be tracked for his "online activity" during his/her stay, that's one of the goals of Captive Portals - I just think that a more efficient way to perform this task would be nice!
2. Most ppl traveling on the road every day would have 3G or GPRS
This basically wipes out the need of Captive Portals/Hotspots, right? :)
3. I would think it would be a very individual feature/setup from a design point.
As I stated before, it's just an improvement of the GUI, which is now little oriented to be for a front-office destination. Many users in this forum are asking for a simple way to get credentials for their users, some way that involves fewer clicks and better handling of the newly-created credentials (I thought of the printer, but a Postscript/PDF generation would be nice too, or sending via mail).
Thanks for the reference to the other topic, if I'll start some serious customization I'll begin from there :)
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The whole idea is exactly what I need! Except, the printing part, I don't need it that much :) Anyway, we need it where we sell the net to customers of a hotel, by hour. But currently we are jsut enabling it for unlimited hours/limited days, because captive portal is capable of doing it only.
Isn't there any way to do this?
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Isn't there?
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Well, the gateway to the solution is there: the Captive Portal can already identify against a RADIUS server.
Now, all what is needed is "feeding the RADIUS server" with access credentials.
Running and managing a Radius server and all the backend / front stuff is beyond pfSense’s scope.
Note that the Captive Portal part of pfSense is already a strange function for a Firewall/router (Am-I allowed to say that pfSense is a industrial strength Firewall/routeur ?! ;) ) and that I’m happy its there - running a hotel myself. -
Well, if someone knows the exact way to do it, I'll be happy to read a how-to :)
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Hey there,
check this, should do the trick while waiting for the 2.0 with full user management
http://www.technicallyamusing.com/?p=29
It's working, graphics kind of messy but readable ; you can also translate the fields in you own language.
Enjoy
