Mom needs help setting up a router in a coffee shop

[Anibal P]

Mom is setting up a small coffee shop, as part of the service she will provide wireless

She already has Comcast Business service

I'll be the IT guy

What settings will I need to setup to make sure the wireless portion runs good and as secure as possible, suggestions for wireless routers appreciated too

[imachip]

Few q's:

Can you estimate how many users your cafe may serve?

Does your mum expect users to pay for wireless access or is it free access point?

Do you want the password to change every day/week to limit access to customers?

[Anibal P]

Good questions, I'll have to call her and see exactly what she wants

[lars77]

Definitely firewall the wifi from the local LAN. A good QOS setup is a plus. And even better, just have certain ports open on that wireless network. On the low-end you can pull this off w/ a Tomato mod compatible router.

Like imachip already mentioned, a lot of this depends how locked-down you're looking to set it up for, & whether you want to go all-out & restrict usage to certain lengths of time & whatnot. Otherwise she's basically going to have one of those coffee shops where people take up the tables all day while only buying 1-2 cups of coffee. (a common issue w/ coffee shop owners!) But that sort of thing is up to her.

[remixedcat]

What router is she going to be using?

Definitly setup guest networks.

[pes2013]

First, use a DDWRT router without a doubt; Will help you organize things a lot better :)

Related to that, DDWRT has a function that allows you to add ads when you connect to a certain SSID I think. It will generate a small amount of revenue :)

If your mom can be bothered, I suggest not allowing any unauthorized mac on the network. And a limited time at that. In DDWRT, you can setup hours for internet access (example; only allow from 8am to 8pm)

[+BudMan MVC]

So what else is going to be on this network, computers used to run the coffee shop? If so then yes you would want to isolated the wireless users from this network.

Could be as simple as just setup guest and leave it open or setup it up password that users when they buy something or just ask at the counter.

Or you could get fancy with a captive portal and purchase of time, etc.

if you want to go with captive portal and purchase of time, or get tokens for time used when they buy coffee, etc. Then I would go with canned system for this - just google captive portals.

If you want to roll your own - then sure there is stuff like

http://coova.org/CoovaChilli

or check out here for some info on captive portals and links to different systems you could setup.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captive_portal

[Anibal P]

It will be for about 50 or so people, free wireless access, with daily password reset

Few q's:

Can you estimate how many users your cafe may serve?

Does your mum expect users to pay for wireless access or is it free access point?

Do you want the password to change every day/week to limit access to customers?

[Dick Montage]

May I also bring up legal issues... Say someone connects and downloads illegal stuff (certain types of porn, copyright protected music, etc). I don't know about where you are, but the provider of the service legally assumes some responsibility...

[Joe User]

It will be for about 50 or so people, free wireless access, with daily password reset

Do you really need passwords in a coffee shop? Lower the wifi signal to not go outside the shop and you won't have to worry about outside users. Then just figure out some way to kick people off after 30 mins, or you'll be overcrowded like Starbucks.

[moloko]

yeah passwords are a pain in the ass. coffee shop I went to often had just open to connect in the area. So you could sit out side if you wanted to. They did not block any websites either. but good idea to build a vlan for the work computers and customer computers.

firewall is a must.