Logins with different MAC addresses

[dmeldrum]

Patronsoft:

markw left the following question on your forum.

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"I have encountered a slight problem that I do not know if there is a compromise that would work to resolve it.

My Firstspot users login using username and password. There is no MAC control because basically if a customer wishes to use a laptop and the kids have their own laptop/pc - the kids can log on once Mum & Dad are finished and logged out, rather than paying for two accounts. Which is what I consider to be fair.

However I have a customer whom both he and his wife have laptops. One connects & uses the internet and is then logged out when his wife connects. When he then tries to navigate further he has to log in again, but as he has set Windows to remember password, he can reconnect with a simple key press and a click.

So we end up with one username logging in and out repeatedly with two mac addresses. I don't want to use MAC address filtering if I can help it.

I would like a way of making this behaviour inconvenient to the user so that the browsing experience would be interrupted for a set time.

However I don't wish to inconvenience users logging in on the same machine, who have mistakenly logged out & need to reconnect quickly.

I know that there is a control in Auth Serv which you can use to set a delay before the same machine can log in again - is there anyway of doing this for different machines/macs?

I am trying to provide a balanced 'acceptable usage' system without being too restrictive - but as this is a paid for service I need to still maintain control over usage.

Would appreciate your views and thank you for your swift replies to my previous posts.

Mark

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I too, like Mark, am losing alot of revenue from people who create a 24 hour account on our network and then share the username and password with all of their friends. The user logs verify this scenerio repeatedly.

Could you possibly look at giving us (those who purchased FirstSpot) a way to limit the unlimited logins to a single login from the computer which created the original account. That way those who want to give away their services can do so and those of us who want to charge for our services can as well.

This is no different than what Patronsoft does in protecting their investment; you provide a "license key" tied to a particular MAC address so people won't use your program on more than one computer.

Thanks for your consideration.
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Don

[alan]

Do the suggestions we made in http://www.patronsoft.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1246 help?
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~ Patronsoft Limited ~

[dmeldrum]

I did read the reply you gave to Mark prior to sending a post to FirstSpot.

The suggestions you had made to Mark are listed below:

There are couple of workarounds I can think of:

1) You might want to implement "Data Transfer Quota" to limit the bandwidth they consume

When people purchase an account from us, I believe we charge a fair rate to surf the net at a reasonable speed. If I limit the bandwidth a subscriber receives the only perception a subscriber would have would be that our system sucked. They would think we offered an inferior service for what they paid as compared to other hotspots they had connected to, not to mention the complains to our tech support staff; loss of revenue, etc.

2) You can implement "Access Minutes (timelelft)" to limit the time they can connect to the Internet.

Same issue as above. The solution is not offering an inferior service and, as you know, who has the time to monitor their network to see who and who hasn't "shared" their account and then, if someone had the time to do so, and found someone who had shared their account, how would you contact them and more importantly, what recourse would you have if you did get in contact with them?

3) You can take advantage of "Use MAC as username" feature. Yes, that involve knowing the client MAC in advance. But I think this is reasonable since the issue here is that you want to limit the machine/person that can share an account. And the MAC address is that "identifier" of the client PC. You can push this idea even further by putting 2 different prices - one for normal username/password and the cheaper one is MAC/password.

We run a Wifi network and we purchased FirstSpot because people could login to our network remotely, provision their account and surf the net without us touching them. Having the end-user call us to provision an account in advance is not something that we could do. That is what computers are for.

Please understand, I have used FirstSpot for two weeks and I think that you have a good program, I am only asking that you consider making a modification to your software that will allow those who purchased the program the ability to limit the end-user to one account on one computer; just like Patronsoft does when they sell a license.

Thank you,
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Don

[alan]

So, basically what you want is that FirstSpot remembers the MAC address when a particular user first logs in, and then that username will stick to that MAC address afterwards?
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~ Patronsoft Limited ~

[dmeldrum]

Exactly; so the person who purchased the account may only use the account purchased on that machine.

Thank you,
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Don