HotSpot Solution NoCat

After evaluating a number of products I found NoCat to be the best open source solution for building hot spots. We aren’t an ISP, but we often host seminars where techie clients need Internet access. To effectively isolate that traffic from our network we created a separate link off our head-end router, and connected it to a vanilla PC running NoCat + Redhat 9.0. Another advantage is advertising; we wanted to let everyone know who is providing this great service. NoCat lets you force users to read a disclaimer before they can access the Internet. This helps protect us legally, and ensures clients will see our logo every day.

SPECS
Compaq Desktop
300MHz 64MB RAM
10GB Hard Drive
2 x Netgear FA311 NIC’s

INSTALL
Before installing NoCat we setup a DHCP server on the router. It turns out the installation for the DHCP server was more complicated then the hotspot! The process was very smooth and refined. These guys make it easy to quickly bring up a hotspot. The configuration was created automatically during installation. Because we run a cluster of access points we decided to just run two network cards, and do basically routing on the machine, if you only want one access point you can configure it with a wireless network card. We then connected three access point to a switch network behind the new “hotspot router” and everything worked prefect. As always we created some basic scripts to automatically start the services after a reboot and manage the servers log files since this was going to be an unmanaged solution.

TESTING
It worked exactly as expected. We configured the software to store users MAC addresses for 24 hours. Afterward the user would be forced to reread our splash page. The solution has been running for a full year now, and we’ve had no complaints.

CONCLUSION
We’d recommend this solution to anyone who is looking to launch a hotspot. The process is simple from beginning to end. All you need to do is install a vanilla version of your favorite Linux distribution, setup DHCP, setup NoCat, and your up and running. From the initial installation to launch the setup only took a few hours.