Wingate and re-sell clients

[a31ford]

Greetings,

I'm thinking of purchasing W/G pro 12 user for a local re-sell application out in a rural setting, incoming is a P2P wireless connection, with a dedicated incoming IP, from there, to two professional AP's on a 100 ft tower would re-sell the service using hidden SSID, and Client Auth MAC addresses, I would like to use W/G in a dual net-card config dedicated server inplace of an old bay networks router, the thing here is that I need to set restricted bandwidth for the evening hours when most of my clients will be home, later into the evening, the restriction can be changed to a more open config for those that want to "work late".

One other thing is that I would like to enable quota monitoring on a monthly basis, as clients are charged on a per 100mb useage basis after inital base.

Can W/G do both of these ?

Thank you in advance.

[adrien]

Hi

WinGate can do the bandwidth restriction, but the quota monitoring is more difficult. Would you be assigning the IP addresses to the clients? If so, you can use DHCP and assumptions to assume a certain IP belongs to a certain user account, which can then be used for accumulating usage stats.

Actually what do you mean by quota monitoring?

Regards

Adrien

[a31ford]

HI , thanks for the reply, in answer to your question,

Definition of a "client" in this application:
A client is connected using a remote wireless system, to the Main Access point, about 1 to 5 km. away, the main is where the WG server resides, we will call this "The Access Point".

Access Point:
Is the "central hub" and has an dedicated T3 incoming connection, the WG server resides between the incoming and outgoing access point.

Quota:
Used in the term of each client is allowed "X" Quota, if they exceed this Quota, there is an upcharge of "X" dollars per Giga-bit they are "Over their Quota"

IP would be fixed per client (dedicated) and in this case, DHCP would NOT be used, as they all have routers at their end of the link, they would use DHCP at their end.

WG 192.168.1.15 (also gateway & dns)
Clients routers (wan side) 192.168.1.1 to 12, (their lan side) 192.168.0.x

I'm assuming this would have a subnet of 255.255.255.0 on WG as their routers are one hop down from WG.

thanks in advance.
Greg

[logan]

Sounds like a pretty interesting scenario. As long as you're not trying to enforce a quota limit, easy as well. Here's my general suggestions.


1. Use Wireless Routers that can do NAT on the client side. This will let the client have as many IP's on their local subnet as they want, but your WinGate server will only have to deal with the one IP address of the router itself. Also, a Wireless Router that can do NAT would be expected to have some sort of firewall to protect the networks of your clients, without preventing them from talking to each other if they want to open ports. Or you could simply enable Layer 2 isolation on the main access point to prevent all joined devices from talking to each other. L2 isolation is typically employed in wireless hotspots.

Routers can obtain a DHCP IP address from WinGate automatically. You can use DHCP reservations to set which IP addresses each router gets assigned and make sure nobody else gets assigned that IP address.

The client computers behind the wireless routers then get their DHCP from the wireless router instead of WinGate. There can be as many computers on the client network as they wish, but WinGate will only have to deal with the one IP address assigned to the Wireless router.


2. Since each Wireless router has a single IP address, you can create a user for each of the joining networks, and use IP assumptions to assume each IP as a the appropriate user in WinGate. WinGate will then be able to accumulate quota data for each of the users.


3. Disable the guest account so that unassumed conenctions are not allowed. If a user manually sets their IP to one which they haven't been assigned to try and work around their quota, WinGate will not let them.


4. In regards to actually collecting and using the data for charging purposes, that's easy. Each user has a tab in their properties called accounting. This tab displays the users traffic in 5 dimensions; "Traffic sent to the internet on behalf of the client (bytes)", "Traffic received from the internet on behalf of the client (bytes)", "Traffic sent to client (bytes)", "Traffic received from client (bytes)", and "Time online (seconds)".

There are also extra fields that let you assign charge rates for each of the traffic dimensions, and show a calculated priced. Saves you doing all the calculations yourself :). It also handles prepaying.

At the end of each month, you want to export this data to a file, and then 0 off all the user accounts for the new month. This can be done from from the scheduler. The actions you want to schedule are "export user accounts" and " reset all user accounts".


You will now have a file which lists all the users, and how much traffic they have used.



This is only a quick overview of what you can do. If you want to talk about anything in more detail, or would like assistance setting up this scenario, add me on skype. My skype name is in my signature.

[a31ford]

A Great "THANK YOU" to both of you..

I've downloaded the new WG (feb 4/09) and will play with it as a client on the existing system (got to get a box for a server first).

For what it's worth, I have used WG 3.0 on 98 years ago, so do remember some of the features from then, NOW I see the need for them, but at the time thought them "useless"... LOL, how wrong can one be ???? LMAO !

Thanks again, this whole changeover has been very time consuming, and I do give you guys "Two Thumbs UP !!" for your excellent and prompt replies.

Greg Manning, EDS Network Eng. Retired.

PS, to your managers.... Keep these two, they are good !