Wireless in an Internet Cafe

May 25, 2005 9:48 AM

I run an internet cafe in Co. Cork, Ireland. We have recently added a wireless router to accommodate our customers who use wireless cards in their laptops. I need to be able to monitor who's using my wireless connection and possibly how much bandwidth they are using. Anyone know of a windows application that will do this?
posted by Livewire Confusion to computers & internet (13 comments total)

Which router are you using? Most units out there at least will show the IP addresses of connected PCs.

Otherwise, I could see taking an old PC, loading up Smoothwall or one of the other Linux firewalls, and putting it between your router and the outside world. It looks like Smoothwall keeps logs with time and IP address.
posted by SteveInMaine at 10:10 AM on May 25, 2005

Another linux-based solution comes from nocat.net.
posted by odinsdream at 10:29 AM on May 25, 2005

Smoothwall won't work this project, i am affraid. Our wireless is on the same internal network as the LAN which is in turn going through our smoothwall firewall. Therefore you could have a thousand connections on the wireless router but only show up as one connection on the internal network.

Also, I need an app that my non-tech savvy staff can use on the front end to see who is on and if they are using more thant their fair share of bandwidth.
posted by Livewire Confusion at 10:41 AM on May 25, 2005

Which router are you using? Most units out there at least will show the IP addresses of connected PCs.

We are using an SMC Barricade G.

Any help is apriciated.
posted by Livewire Confusion at 10:43 AM on May 25, 2005

These guys make an app like that. I've never used it though.

NoCatAuth would do the authentication and the bandwidth monitoring part, but I don't think I've heard of an open source app that does what you want on Windows.
posted by cmonkey at 10:53 AM on May 25, 2005

Deterministic Networks bandwidth management products may help, or may be overkill for your situation.

(Disclaimer -- I work for them, though not in an area where I know enough to assess the match between what you need and what the products can do)
posted by anadem at 12:13 PM on May 25, 2005

Is it too late for you to return the SMC and get a Linksys? You could run one of the replacement bioses which include QoS and not have to worry about someone slurping up more than their fair share....
posted by phearlez at 12:47 PM on May 25, 2005

If the SMC supports SNMP monitoring, this might help:

http://www.paessler.com/prtg/
posted by effugas at 1:02 PM on May 25, 2005

Even though your wireless station is included as part of your regular network currently, you may want to consider changing this. It would make monitoring considerably easier if you set up the wireless network as its own network with a firewall between that and the rest of your LAN. What's the downside to this approach? You could run another smoothwall on very inexpensive hardware and tie it in to your network easily.
posted by odinsdream at 2:38 PM on May 25, 2005

Smoothwall won't work this project, i am affraid. Our wireless is on the same internal network as the LAN which is in turn going through our smoothwall firewall. Therefore you could have a thousand connections on the wireless router but only show up as one connection on the internal network.

Why wouldn't smoothwall be able to distinguish the individual devices on the wireless LAN? Are you hooking the wireless router to the smoothwall box via its WAN port? If so, don't. Just turn of its DHCP server and hook one of the lan ports on the wireless box to your LAN. Each wireless client will have its own IP on the LAN.

If Smoothwall has quality of service/automatic bandwidth management then it shouldn't even be necessary to have employees check bandwidth and then try and figure out which user has which computer.
posted by Good Brain at 10:37 PM on May 25, 2005

Why wouldn't smoothwall be able to distinguish the individual devices on the wireless LAN? Are you hooking the wireless router to the smoothwall box via its WAN port? If so, don't. Just turn of its DHCP server and hook one of the LAN ports on the wireless box to your LAN. Each wireless client will have its own IP on the LAN

If Smoothwall has quality of service/automatic bandwidth management then it shouldn't even be necessary to have employees check bandwidth and then try and figure out which user has which computer.

I don't think I'm understanding you correctly, due to my understanding of NAT (network address translation) anything behind a router on its own private network.

For instance, a standard package from leading broadband providers give you 1 IP address.

Behind your router which has the external IP you have 1 standard class c network. 192.168.x.x.

To the outside world any request made to a server shows up as your external IP address, therefore applying this principal to the wireless would mean that, as I said before, even if I had 1 thousands connections on the wireless connection, it would only show up on smoothwall as 1 connection due to network translation.

am I understanding this correctly?
posted by Livewire Confusion at 2:24 PM on May 27, 2005

Perhaps I made the wrong assumption about your network topology.

My assumption is that the wired clients and the wireless router connect to a LAN. The LAN is connected to the smoothwall router which is then connected to the net by some means.

In such an arrangement I would expect the smoothwall to do the NAT to map the clients in the cafe with their individual private addresses down to a single IP address on the public internet. The alternative, I suppose, is that the smoothwall passes untranslated packets on to another router integrated into a cable or DSL modem.

In either case, the smoothwall box would be seeing all the individual private IP addresses of the machines wired directly to the LAN.

The same should also be the case with the wireless clients, provided that you hook the Barricade G to the LAN via one of the 4 LAN ports, rather than the single WAN port and turn off its DHCP server. In this arrangement, the smoothwall will see no difference between the wired and wireless clients. Each will have their own locally unique IP address on the private network.

Given this arrangement, any per-machine bandwidth monitoring available on the smoothwall should give useful data for wireless clients, and any automatic bandwidth limiting features should be able to do the same. Note: This all assumes that these features are availble on smoothwall, as other posters have suggested.
posted by Good Brain at 11:43 PM on May 27, 2005

Worked like a charm. You the man. thanks
posted by Livewire Confusion at 7:23 AM on May 29, 2005