This entry is part 2 of 5 in the Ubuntu Hotspot with Daily Per-User Quotas series

In a previous post, I talked about my quest for a captive portal which supports per-user download quotas (and also explain what the heck a captive portal is).

Here's a list of features which I was looking for in the Captive Portal:

  1. Free!
  2. Web-based administration
  3. Users need to login before having access to the internet
  4. Volume-based accounting – as opposed to time-based accounting. User quotas are determined by the amount of bandwidth they consume.
  5. Daily (or some other time period) reset of quotas
  6. When the quota is consumed, internet access is blocked till the quota has been reset.
  7. Support for DNS and HTTP caching

Existing options

I surveyed a number of the router firmware/linux distro options, including DD-WRT, OpenWRT, Gargoyle, Tomato, pfSense, IPCop, Untangle, etc. None could do the job out-of-box, or suggested a relatively straightforward pathway to implementation.

Most offered some kind of QoS bandwidth throttling, and or limited quota system, but not all the features I needed in one.

The only out-of-box software that seemed to be a perfect fit was the popular Windows hotspot program FirstSpot. It is however prohibitively expensive.

After alot of research, I finally decided to go with an open-source PHP/MySQL-based hotspot solution called EasyHotSpot.

In my next post, I'll talk about EasyHotSpot – what is it is, what it does for you, and what it doesn't.


Ubuntu Hotspot with Daily Per-User Quotas

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