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Redirecting Delinquent Dialup Customers

This topic has been a source of discussion since ISP-Planet opened for business in 1999. Here's the latest update.

[January 17, 2006]

On the ISP-Tech list in October, WS asked:

Greetings all,

I am the admin for a small ISP. I would like to have some help implementing a forced redirect page for non-paying customers (dialup).

I want it so that when a non-paying customer connects with our service:

1. They can only surf to the "you have not paid" web page.

2. The session is timed—they are kicked off after a few minutes.

3. Maybe offer access to Paypal for an online payment (the only site allowed).

I am using Ascend MAXes for dialup. Can anyone out there help me with this? Or has anyone done something similar? Any info would be greatly appreciated.

[CS replied] "If you are putting them behind a firewall, you could do this with custom Radius attributes (added automatically by your billing software when an account becomes past due) and then rewrite the packets with the firewall to redirect the traffic to you 'you are a low life' page. You might be able to do that in your core router(s) to, potentially, depending on what you are using there and if you want that added load to those routers. Might check your docs on your RAS to see if it might not have such support.

Another option might be to proxy all of your dialup users to a proxy. With a Linux proxy, you could then rewrite the packets to point to your page, or let it go as originally requested, or even use the http proxy then to give some speedup to your dialup users and reduce (some) your Internet bandwidth.

There are probably other options too, but these are a couple of suggestions to look at."

[TC reported] "We use a Star-OS router to do the redirect.. It's designed for the wireless internet, but it's easy to do a redirect on anyone who goes through it. An old motherboard with 2 NICs and a $40 Star-OS license will do it for you."

[BBS recommended] "Sounds like you need an old BBS system."

[BL pontificated] "How does a non-paying customer get online? Certainly you areauthenticating users, right?

If you take a look at the IE Administration Kit (IEAK), you should find some information there. There is also a book from Microsoft.

We have a signup CD with a custom version of IE and an auto run program that launches IE in signup mode using an embedded phone number and userid/password. The userid/password is static in the MAX used for signups and the account can only go to the IP address of the signup server. The signup mode of IE has that URL as the default and that is the only choice. From the signup CGI, you collect the signup data and you can handle payment as you like. The book above has a sample signup CGI as well. I would recommend not using it except as a guide to learn from.

TC replied to BL, adding further suggestions:

"That's why we started doing re-directs for wireless customers who haven't paid. The dialup users can't get on at all, although we are changing our pages now to take all non payers to our online payment screen so they can reactivate instantly. Then our script removes the redirect from the firewall automatically."

—End