Imagine that you are the owner of a chain of small coffee houses. You need to release clients to the Internet, taking into account the requirements of the law on identification.
And since your business is catering, you probably do not have extensive knowledge in IT. And, as always, there is no time for deployment. The sooner we open a cafe, the greater the profit.
The fastest way to raise public Wi-Fi that I have found.
We are deploying Wi-Fi for customers in our coffee shop.
In the first establishment:
1. We buy a Zyxel Wi-Fi point with Nebula support.
For 20 seats I would take .
If your cafe is in the city center with dense buildings and a huge number of Wi-Fi routers around, then you should pay attention to the model with smart antenna.
Do not forget to choose a power supply or PoE injector 2. Mount the point on the ceiling/wall. Or we just throw it on the table, as I observed at IL Patio in Novosibirsk3. Connect to an existing router which automatically distributes addresses (DHCP). The router vendor doesn't matter.4. Register at https://nebula.zyxel.com/
5. Use the wizard to create an organization.
6. We bind the device by entering only its serial number and poppy. You can have several at once.7. Set up Wi-Fi for the main network.
8. Authorization of clients for now by clicking the Agree button, we will finish the full configuration later
9. Go to the control panel
10. Register on a service that provides identification of your customers by phone number.The search gives them dofiga. I tried the global-hotspot.ru service. They give 10 days for the test, which is enough for me to write an article. I got a link that will come in handy later.
A feature of this service is a non-standard method of identification by an incoming call.
That is, after entering the number in a special form, the client is offered to call from his number to the toll-free number 8-800. The system sees the subscriber's number and drops the call.
Subscription fee from 700 rubles per month. I did not see any restrictions on the number of points. 11. Adjust guest Wi-FiIn Nebula, go to AP -> Configuration -> SSIDs -> Edit on the selected network
Choosing click-to-continue and enable seamless roaming Assisted roaming
By the way, here you can limit the speed of each specific client so that one person does not occupy the entire channel.
12. Set up the authorization portal (captive portal).Go to Captive Portal Settings
Enable the use of an external portal and insert the previously received link
In the "To promotion URL" field, you can specify the page that will be opened to the client after successful identification, for example, the restaurant menu. Now the point will suck in the generated config and in a few minutes you will be able to use Wi-Fi.
The minimum settings have been made. The rest of the various settings are already according to your taste and needs.
In other establishments:
1. We buy a Zyxel Wi-Fi point with Nebula support
2. Mount the point on the ceiling/wall.
3. Connect to an existing router4. Adding New Points to NebulaOr through the site
or from a mobile app
The new point will receive the previously created config.
Well, how much easier?
For comparison, an hour-long webinar recording .
How is this magic possible?
Today it is fashionable to call technologies "Cloud" even if they have nothing to do with the clouds. ("stone" towards Mikrotik CCR), devaluing the real technology that the concept of "cloud" hides.
Nebula Pure Water is an SDN network controller that is provided to you as a service ().
Software-defined network or software-defined network (English software-defined networking, SDN) is a data communication network in which the network management level is separated from data transmission devices and is implemented in software. A form of network virtualization. © Wikipedia
Zyxel has developed a controller that provides you with a logical and intuitive interface for setting up and monitoring equipment. At the same time, the devices themselves receive a clean config with already calculated data. That is, with the same hardware inside, the network device is more efficient, since it itself no longer recalculates the parameters (the same routes).
Typically, this approach is implemented in large data centers and the solutions they implement cost a lot of money. But for medium and small businesses, such a model can be just as useful and not so expensive.
Seamless roaming
In Mikrotik, to set up the controller, you need to . At the same time, Mikrotik does not support any of the existing standards for seamless roaming (802.11 k / v / r) ... At least, I did not find such settings either in wiki.mikrotik.com or in the Winbox interface. Unfortunately, Mikrotik still lags far behind other vendors in terms of Wi-Fi. TapuNet - Mikrotik hap ac2; Zyxel-5G - NWA5123-AC HD. Physically stand in one place.
In Zyxel, these protocols are enabled at the touch of a button.
More details about roaming protocols are well described
Nebula License
In our context, enough . When registering my outlets, a “PRO” license also arrived until 2022.
Cloud security
Not infrequently I hear that someone is afraid to use the Nebula cloud: “And fdrukh spyware will steal it.”
But no one complains about AWS cloud services. Entire companies keep mail on gmail and yandex. Modern mobile phones lose their functionality without being tied to the cloud…
Therefore, being afraid that someone will steal something from Nebula, given that only your network configs are stored there, is somehow stupid.
Nebula is constantly evolving.While I was writing this article, nebula introduced device firmware control. which allows you to quickly eliminate the detected vulnerabilities.
Don't forget that Zyxel is a world-class company that cares about its reputation.
Conclusion
In fact, part of the work that a network administrator must do to configure and maintain equipment has been done by Zyxel and is provided as a service. In our case, we paid only the cost of the equipment.
Setting up the hardware in conjunction with Nebula is very simple. You don't need to fill in 100500 parameters to enable real seamless roaming.
As needs grow, this infrastructure can be easily developed. For example, if you need to filter traffic, then Nebula for Wi-Fi can always be replaced .
Ask questions about the article and discuss this and other hardware from Zyxel on the Telegram channel @zyxelru. By the way, after official representatives of Zyxel Russia appeared on the channel.
If you know other HotSpot deployment methods, please share in the comments.
Source: habr.com