Multiple MACs using one account

[markw]

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

[alan]

Well, this is an interesting scenario.

Currently, FirstSpot does not have delay login. The delay you talked about is for self sign-up only.

There are couple of workarounds I can think of:

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

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

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.
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