Introduction

This section contains documentation on work done regarding testing of an implementation that would make it as easy as possible for a would-be entrepreneur to deploy an ISP service over a wireless network infrastructure. The entrepreneur should be able to manage, monitor and charge users with ease.

Setup Ingredients

The tools used to setup this testbed:

Coova WISP-in-a-box Wireless Africa wiki, URL
phpMyPrepaid Wireless Africa wiki, URL
FreeRADIUS
MySQL
Ubuntu Hardy Server - This is the distro that was used for the gateway server. In future, it is intended to have this setup (when finalized) integrated into Inveneo Hub Server Linux.

Setup Recipe

At the moment the intention of this setup is to mainly test billing support, and is more of a wifi-hotspot setup. It will later on be modified to adapt to a wireless mesh network environment. The gateway server has an external network interface (e.g, eth0) that is connected to the Internet, and an internal network interface (e.g, eth3), connected to the Coova Linksys Router (internal network). In this case the external network interface gets its IP address automatically (dhcp). The internal network interface is assigned a static ip address (e.g, 192.168.5.1), therefore the Coova WAN interface is also set to static (e.g, 192.168.5.4).

Coova

Setup coova to act as a Chillispot-type hotspot, with auto-configuration disabled. (Setup may be tested later on with WifiDog instead of Chillispot).
Fill in UAM Hostname, UAM Secret, NAS Identifer information.
Fill in RADIUS server details and secret. (To be inserted into FreeRADIUS configuration on Gateway server.)

Gateway server

Install Ubuntu Server (Hardy), with minimum MySQL, FreeRADIUS, Apache webserver.
Install webmin. Webmin is a great tool with a web-based frontend to administer many important settings under Linux (Startup/Shutdown Scripts, DNS, DHCP, Firewall, NAT; also supports plugins for other tools). (an apparently better alternative is ispconfig, but I've not tested this tool yet.)
Setup DNS forwarding on gateway server, using dnsmasq. (bind9 can also be used, but dnsmasq is a much more easier option to setup for users that are not familiar with bind). Todo: Should check out dnsmasq webmin module.

More to follow within the next few days.