Hi everybody,

This is my first post, and I´ve tried to search the forum with no results.

We have a cloud based solution to provide AAA and Captive Portal services. We use Mikrotik equipment to redirect the hotspot to out servers and use the location-id radius parameter to tell between different locations.

With that location-id, we can customise the captive portal, offer different services, different logos and pictures, disclaimers and so on.

Everything works fine when we only have one hotspot per device. Why should we have more? Imagine you have a big hotel with different areas: Lobby, Rooms, Cafeteria and Swimming Pool.

You may want to provide free internet access to users in the lobby, but only for 15 minutes. And maybe you want them to land on the hotel webpage. But for the users in the rooms you want to provide free 24h internet access, and only social login to users in the swimming pool, and landing to your facebook page after liking it.

If you enable mac-cookies, users are reauthenticated without problems... except when they move.

Different areas are separated by vlans or ports. When a device moves from a hotspot to another, it gets a different IP address.

I think you can't share ip addresses between different hotspots on the same routerboard. So for instance:

hotspot1 is 10.0.0.1 and users are in the network 10.0.0.0/24
hotspot2 is 10.0.1.1 and users are in the network 10.0.1.0/24
hotspot3 is 10.0.2.1 and users are in the network 10.0.2.0/24

When the users moves from hotspot1 to hotspot2, the MAC Address is in the ARP list with two addresses, and will appear as a host twice in the hotspot/hosts pannel. That causes the mac-cookie to be deleted, thus forcing the user to re-authenticate. Whatsapp and other "always-online" services stop working, and the user is disappointed.

I've tried to reduce the ARP timeout (minimum is 30s) and even create a script to flush the ARP table every couple seconds, and also have to reduce the hotspot idle timeout to the same value, so the user is timed-out quickly and the mac-cookie is created. But this is just a workaround and have several problems: more cpu usage, more radius traffic and won't work if the radio is good enough and does not have shadows of coverage.



So, after all this long post... here are the questions...

- Is there any way to share the IP addressing and dhcp server between several hotspots? That way the host will be only one...

- Any idea?

Thanks in advance to everybody!

Germán