Hi everybody, I just wanted to share how glad we are that pfSense exists. Usually people mostly share problems, but this time I just wanted to highlight what we have been able to achieve with a little bit of customization. Please let me know if this isn't the right forum for this and point to other place where I can share my appreciation.
I'm working for a NGO in rural Africa (Malawi) and with pfSense we might probably run the biggest free WiFi hotspot throughout whole Malawi. Nothing special for modern installations, but in places with poor power and high communication costs the dimensions are pretty unique. So far we have around 25 access points that are used by approx. 100 unique systems/users during a typical business day. All this squeezes through a slow, high latency satellite link (~500 kBits/s downstream) and thanks to the Captive Portal components provides free access for all (through our public computers, other laptops as well as smartphones) while it is still manageable. In a nutshell we have/can: - Open access points without passwords (mainly running on dd-wrt) - A custom portal page where users need to register for the first time they connect to the network - RADIUS MAC authentication (yes, yes, it might be possible to fool, but in our context without hard billing requirements good enough) - Default (low) speed group for unknown users through Captive portal bandwidth restriction - Increase (promote) systems/users to higher bandwidth limits by admins - Blocking websites based on domain/URL and time of day - Mail notifications for important events (new user signed up, weekly RRD stats, reboots, ...) - 'Jail' for misbehaving systems and a HTTP redirecting to let them know - Optional Voucher support - Support for internal Voice over IP - (so far only imperfect) RADIUS accounting - Reports with last time systems were connected (usefull for cleanup RADIUS users) - Support for external monitoring solutions of internal network devices All this with ordinary pfSense customizations and a few custom extensions. I feel all this is pretty 'out of the box' pfSense, but I'm also happy to elaborate a bit more on this if someone finds this interesting. Thanks a lot for making our life a bit easier! christian -- IT/Medical Informatics Manager Partners In Health - Abwenzi Pa Za Umoyo Neno, Malawi _______________________________________________ List mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pfsense.org/mailman/listinfo/list
