Cybercafe setup

[THIERRY]

Hello Guys,

My cousin has setup a small restaurant in town and now he is asking me to turn it into a small Cyberface with only four computers and one for the Administrator. He has watched me fixed computers for clients when I am off University. I have told him that I have never setup one before apart a house network with two computers. I told him I will seek advises to you guys. What kind of software he need to buy to run in those PC, with the Administrator controlling the remaining PC, fixing minutes to login in the internet and all relevant security processes.
Thanks a lot for your guides and comments.

Thierry.

[mbossman2]

it depends.

If you are setting it up for 5 PCs, all owned by the cafe and there are no charges, then you can do this all through the router.

If, OTOH, you are looking to charge for the privilege, you'll have to make a decision as to how to deal with this.

you can

1) outsource this to a managed services company (they take care of the billing and remittance, tech support - - for a fee)
2) manage this in house.

[THIERRY]

mbossman2 thanks a lot for that. My Cousin will be charging for the Internet Service and would like a reliable software to monitor all the customer computers. I may help him for all the computer settings. Do you know any viable software to suit the purpose , if all this we will be managed from within the Cybercafe ?
Thanks

Thierry

[mojo]

One way to do it for free would be to use IPCop running on an old computer as your router, and then install an add-on to that called IPBill to handle figuring out how much to charge each customer. IPCop is a custom version of Linux designed to turn an old, almost useless computer into a very nice router. I've used it at my house for years and I absolutely love it.

This page is where I first saw the IPBill add-on a few years ago and contains some installation instructions and general information.
http://firewalladdons.sourceforge.net/ipbill.html

However, it looks like the author has his own website now and there is a more current version there.
http://www.hazienda-labs.net/projects.html#_ipbill

Unfortunately, it's in german, so here is the google translation.
http://translate.google.com/translat...hl=en&ie=UTF-8