[isf-wifidog] Future Idea Dump

[Ian White]

Hi,

I noticed that some of these are in the feature list, but I thought I 
just list some of my experiences. I've been running a locustworld 
community mesh for the last 4 years, and played around with publicip

LW uses nocat, and some hacks for whitelists, and walled gardens, and 
I've written a mesh monitoring tool that is a packet sniffer that logs 
bytes in/out by port/user/destination ( meshtrak.com ) .

wifidog is way better than nocat due to its two way communication, and 
heartbeating etc.

Thoughts

1) Separate out wifidog and auth server and publish messaging 
protocols. I think this will give people the option of developing 
their our auth-servers/content servers etc, and allow a shared wifidog 
distribution.

2) User Mac. Is this sent with the login/auth requests ? It would be 
handy to have it passed to the auth server

3) Login options. LW has various options and control levels given the 
possible parameters of user+pass+mac. 
a) Splash only - no login, just terms
b) User+pass
c) mac only - whitelist, auto login (staff perhaps)
d) user+pass+mac (locked down) - admin user

4) User realm/dimension. A gateway is a node, and belongs to a 
network. A user belongs to a network, but a network can be affiliate 
with other networks to allow user account sharing. Makes the admin 
reporting more complex, but may increase take up with business. i.e. 
coffee shop is a node, coffee chain is a network, it may affiliate 
with book shop chain network.

5) Walled garden.

Users are allowed to visit without logging. Means user traffic is not 
logged (no connection id), but allows a network to give user access to 
its own sites etc without login.

LW does this with a 15 minute cron job that sets up the walled list as 
IP chain.

6) Throttle.

While you can build a real complex system, the actual requirement is 
throttle heavy users, or the whole system when its under load. A 
secondary pitch is for community meshes where business hosts nodes and 
throttle access during the day and then open it up when they don't use 
it.

In reality I think you only need three bands high,med,low , and then 
assign a user to one of them. LW gets the band during login, but with 
wifidog, you could use it a part of the auth update to reallocate a 
user to a new band. If you wanted to get really techie, then the auth 
server could auto manage it.

7) Tickets.

Public ip sets up tick users with time limits or download limits, you 
should be able to monitor this, and use the auth server to remove the 
user.

8) MyStatus/Messaging.

PublicIp does use windows messaging to sent time left/node messages to 
the user, but this relies on the user having windows.

If would be nice if with a DNS redirect the user types 
http://wifistatus/ , and gets their stats, login times, node closure 
time. I can't think of any other way of informing a user when they are 
going to be kicked off due to node opening hours etc.

Ian