I suspect that many churches might like to do something like this in areas where they provide a "public" WiFi network. It would be good to force acceptance of terms and conditions of use.

Just my 2¢ worth,
Curt

I know you're talking more about the router side of thing as you could run Apache, but this gives me an idea about how Opera Unite could be used. I'm guessing the Opera Unite web server could be set up to run an internal site. Although either option seems a bit wasteful if leaving your computer on all the time just for other users in the home to connect to it.

What I envision is having something as simple as the following:
Insert a rule into your router (in my case, it's Linksys) that says that only computers with the Mac Address listed can use the internet. Then, for those computers who's mac addresses are not listed, instead of issuing an "access denied" error or whatever is shown, replace that with the terms & conditions webpage. On successfully submitting the form with the right answers, use a script to automatically insert that mac address into the "allowed users" list, send a command to the user's browser to go to his home page, and away he goes.

To create the form, I would only be knowledgeable in how to do that with PHP. But I do wonder how much memory is available on one of these routers, and if the terms & conditions page could actually be placed on the router, so that you don't have to go through the hassle of setting up a server. Obviously it can "host" webpages, since it has it's own admin panel.

But how all of this would be done, I have no idea.

The type of setup your talking about is called a Captive Portal. Basically a user when they get on your network and launch the browser they hit your portal first which depending on the setup would make them authenticate or just click to accept a EULA, etc. I was recently researching this to add on to my IpCop firewall setup but hit a dead end. pfsense has a built in Captive Portal, I'm thinking of switching my firewall over from ipcop to pfsense and try it out.

-jamie

Actually, it's not as hard as you might imagine. There are several packages already set up for this type of hot spot, and the packages are free. It can be used for any type of hotspot, whether for a church, coffee house, etc. The best part of this is that it can be used on commonly found equipment you might already have lying around, or could easily pick up on e-bay fairly cheap. It's as easy as flashing a router with a package, and setting up how you want it to act. Here's a decent tutorial on an excellent site set up for tutorials:
How To Forge

We recently set up WifiDog at our church. I like it because it breaks out the actual captive portal/router and the authorization system. Which then allows for multiple networks to be managed from one central authorization system.