Beginnings of a description of the CaptivePortal project from a software engineering perspective.

=== Feature Requirements ===
 * Opensource (GPL)
 * Control access (authentication and authorization)
  * Authentication plugins 
   * System (eg. passwd/shadow)
   * LDAP
   * Radius
   * Client side certs
  * Cross platfrom / Portable (perl)
  * Scalable to X (enterprise, service provider etc)
  * Per user bandwidth management rules
  * Independant of link layer security
  * Use of arbitrary protocols to access authentication server (eventually some may desire access without a browser)
  * Modular use of firewall tools (IP Tables, IP Filter etc)
  * Must provide unauthenticated access (guest access)
  * Capable of billing for usage (not the actual billing)
  * Audit trails for user access (especially when users log off)
 * Web based GUI administration ?
 * Allow for different priviledge levels for administrators
 * Internationalized (important to have in mind from day 1)

these aren't directly related to the initial project but long term it needs to be able to:

 * deal with distributed monitoring (providing info and displaying info)
  * access point wireless statistics
  * client node wireless statistics
  * users logged in
 * run external commands on user login 
  * modify ospf tables
  * configure ipsec tunnels

This is not a valid Dataflow Definition from a software engineering standpoint, but it gets the idea across, I believe.
{{http://www.shmoo.com/~gdead/CaptivePortal.jpg}}

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[CategoryDocumentation]