Hi! I do have IPCop installed as my firewall and gateway for my LAN. Now, I also have a Linksys wireless router which servers as an access point. However, I am not contented with Linksys on managing users. First of all, Access restrictions is very basic and I don't get a presentable logs of sites accessed by the users. I am also having difficulty on restricting the webpages being visited by wireless users. Can you suggest some linux OS which can control this Linksys Access Point. Wherein, the Linksys will only serve as the radio and all administration, authentications and logs are on the linux OS? If possible, I wanted to have a web-based authentication for wireless users and have whitelist of which units can access certain restricted sites. Just like the IPCop but for wireless Access Points. Thanks.

Any Linux distro can do this. You need to put 2 NIC's in the Linux box and set up the network as follows:

LAN-->Linksys Router-->eth0 - Linux Box - eth1-->modem-->internet

The linksys router will just work as a switch and all the "smart" routing will be handled by the Linux box.

regards,
...drkstr

drkstr,

How will I be able to do that? How about the DHCP? Who will give IP addresses to the wireless users? And the restrictions, authentications? Is that possible? I want to have unique access levels to each wireless users..Is that possible?

This is all handled by the LInux box. The linksys will be nothing more then a switch. I use dnsmasq for my DHCPD server, but there are other options out there as well. I like dnsmasq because it handles DNS caching/translation as well as DHCP.

You will need to set up access control based on IP addresses. You can configure dnsmasq to set pre determined IP addresses based on the users MAC address, or just assign static IP's to each of the users.

There are many howto's available on setting up a Linux router. Take a peek at a few of them and let me know if you are having a difficult time with anything specifically.

drkstar,

Thanks for helping me out. What I did was connected the Linksys WRT54G on the blue interface of my IPCop. Turned off its DHCP service and used the IPCops and it worked fine. Providing the IP Addresses for wireless users is handled by the IPCop. Now, I can see who is connecting wirelessly. I will need to give them access by adding them on the "Blue Access" of IPCop. NOw, I can also use the urlfilter restrictions on wireless users. Now my question is this, can i add up nocat on ipcop. In such a way that they will need to logon web-based for them to be authenticated and given access by IPCop.

Well I don't think dhcpd is an authenticated protocol, but you could set up something called an ssl tunnel. They would get an ip address from dhcp, but to route any traffic, you could set something up where they would have to log in to establish a tunnel. Then all traffic would be routed though an encrypted tunnel.

I don't really know anything about IPCop so you will have to look at their documentation on how to set this up with it. If you run into trouble, I might be able to help you with the implemenation part, but probably not the interface part.

regards,
...drkstr