topic Re: Open wireless network for guests in Wireless

Open wireless network for guests

plepesant — Sun, 04 Jul 2021 18:13:54 GMT

This is mostly a design question...

I need to implement an open wireless access point for visitors who comes to our office for a few days or a few hours. i.e something simple to use for these people who are generally executives or clients and who do not have time to wait for IT to setup a secure access on their computer. Most of these people only wants to access their Web Email, make a VPN to their head office or surf the internet.

I do not want to provide a public Hot Spot for all the neighbors in the building... So I think of having an https authentication before permiting any IP traffic outside that private network. The same guest password will be provided to our visitors. This password will change every weeks or months this is not a problem.

My first question is: Is it a good scenario ?

Second question: Which hardware could I use manage the authentication ? I have in mind that a PIX can perform http(s) outbound authentication, is that true ?

Thanks for your help.

Pascal

Re: Open wireless network for guests

mattgioia — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 17:27:41 GMT

What we've done is to setup a seperate open, unencrypted ssid on the access points and trunked it back to the network core (not using layer 3 mobility). We put a proxy/captive portal on this network that acts as the gateway. We have this device setup to do radius authentication against ACS. When a user pops up a web browser, it displays a login screen and as soon as they login, away they go.

Re: Open wireless network for guests

d.beaver — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 10:50:02 GMT

Mattgioia,

Are you doing DHCP from the proxy/captive portal or from your normal DHCP server? Also, where can I find more information on the Proxy/Captive portal?

Thanks.

Re: Open wireless network for guests

plepesant — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 14:47:03 GMT

Which product do you use for the proxy/captive portal ?

I think of using the PIX cut-trought proxy feature. is it recommended ?

thank you.

Pascal

Re: Open wireless network for guests

scottmac — Sat, 22 Oct 2005 13:26:24 GMT

Check out "nocat"

It's a free system.

http://nocat.net/

Good Luck

Scott

Re: Open wireless network for guests

richkrissi — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 16:23:43 GMT

You can create a Guest VLAN for your visitors. Place a PIX into your DMZ. Enable DHCP for that VLAN, and then configure your pix for HTTP authentication. I would recommend frequently changing that password.

Re: Open wireless network for guests

mattgioia — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 19:57:15 GMT

DHCP is done by the dhcp server. The captive portal, a lightweight linux distro called m0n0wall, has an entry to forward dhcp.

Re: Open wireless network for guests

sorvarit — Sun, 30 Oct 2005 10:26:16 GMT

Check out http:\\www.publicip.net and the free ZoneCD linuxdistro that you can run on a old pc with two nics. Probably the easyest and most powerful free "ready to go" hotspot solution today? We use this on our guestnet ssid and vlan through 80+ Aironet 1231G. There have been some issues with VPN, but this will probably be fixed soon.