FirstSpot Capabilities

rebel2234 · Joined: 10 Aug 2005 Posts: 7

We was looking at firstspot for a captive portal for our network. Do we have to use FirstSpot on each one of our Acess Points or can we have FirstSpot at our head end to capture clients? We route public ip's to our clients so can firstspot be configured to capture clients from many source networks? Also how many clients can be shaped with bandwidth with say a dual 3.06ghz server running windows server 2003 and 4GB ram? Does FirstSpot have the functioality for a user to be able to print their statement?

alan · **Forum facilitator** Joined: 26 Sep 2003 Posts: 4435

1) One FirstSpot can serve multiple access points. See http://patronsoft.com/firstspot/topologies.html for a diagram.

2) Not too sure about your question about public IP. If you need Real IP for the client, you can take advantage of the "Real IP Address Mapping" feature.

3) For sizing, you can check out a real life example at http://www.patronsoft.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1974

4) Print the statement - we don't generate statement. But we provide complete user log under Configuration Manager -> Users -> Show User Log
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rconaway · Joined: 20 Jan 2005 Posts: 26 Location: Phoenix

We have 220 users run concurrently on a P4 computer with no problems. We have run as many as 800 on dual Xeon 2.6 processors. However, we were running a seperate computer with MS SQL Server. Where the problem comes in is if all the users try to log on at once. When you reboot the server, the login screen and process is really what hammers the processor. 800 people or more logging in will take over a minute for the login screen to pop up with dual xeons.

Given that, new processors are signficantly faster than what we had 4 years ago. I wouldn't hesitate to set up a 1000 user or more dual quad-core processor system today and in fact, plan on doing just that. At that level though, I would be running 2 servers simply for redundancy.

rconaway · Joined: 20 Jan 2005 Posts: 26 Location: Phoenix

I missed the statement issue. Alan, a statement would be really good for the client to print out. We get this request all the time and have to generate a Peachtree invoice since people need it for expenses.

omar.palma · Joined: 13 Jul 2010 Posts: 12 Location: Cali, COL

Which software used before firstspot?
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rconaway · Joined: 20 Jan 2005 Posts: 26 Location: Phoenix

Birdstep but it stunk and was way too expensive.