We are working on our total customer outstanding balance + customer retention. I have seen a few topics about admins having a customers connection direct them to a please pay us website when their balance is overdue.
How would I do this?
I dont have static IP’s
I dont have all customer MAC’s
Thanks!
We usually disable the 802.3 link when a customers account is past due. This is easily done remotely and causes the customer to call the help line because they are unable to connect - they are then directed to the billing dept. :lol:
we seem to really piss people off when we do that.
It would be much more professional to have it directed to an “oops we missed your payment last month” blah blah blah
We stress the locally owned and friendly support aspect.
I would also like to make it automatic due to the time restraints and labor costs.
You need some type of gateway for all traffic, Nomadix, Linux box, etc. then every user is authenticated through the gateway. That is the only way to redirect the traffic from a specific user out of the flow.
We have a bill collector that is mean…
That always gets payment, combined with me disabling the 802.3 link… :twisted:
I’ve always wondered why some of them are so mad when they get disconnected. Technically they owe us an apology for being late, not an attitude problem. The worst one’s will get an extension and the call after the extension has expired wondering why their service does not work…morons
After thinking for a minute, VLAN is the solution.
When thry don’t pay, change the VLAN on the SM and drive that traffic to a page on your web server. Set it up to pay with credit card and then have a mechanism where you get an email that they paid and you can remove the vlan.
People get pissed because they are embarrassed. If they have the opportunity to pay with a credit card and avoid the embarassment they will be less hostile.
Why make it so complicated?
I just disable the ethernet port in the SM. I can still remotely access the SM to re-enable it and they are dead in the water until I do.
That is certainly the easiest way, not necessarily the best way.
A redirect to a webpage with an opportunity for the customer to take care of the bill is certainly more pleasant.
Additionally if they have VoIP and no cell service then they can’t call to get it turned back on. With the redirect you can still allow traffic, and just redirect port 80.
We only use disabling the ethernet as a last ditch effort - before sending a tech to retrieve our equipment. We will have the billing dept. attempt to contact the customer multiple times and if they are unsuccessful we will leave a note in the mailbox if we have a tech in that area. If they still fail to accknowledge then we disable them - no sense having them use bandwidth they are not paying for.
We’re one of the ones who shunt all traffic to a “please pay us” page. We are excessively graceful, it takes two missed payments or a pattern of payment abuse to push us to the point where we will lock an account. At that point if they still yell at us we point out that they are two months overdue and have received at least two, probably three bills from us before we shut off the service, and offer to retrieve the equipment. We don’t get a lot of static.
I’ve posted before on how we do it, look here:
http://motorola.canopywireless.com/support/community/viewtopic.php?p=19138&highlight=#19138
I’ll be glad to share more details of you’d like.
Our billing style is similar to that of what cvs has described in his post.
I forward traffic for non-payers/excessively late payers to a special server that will block all traffic except that of HTTPS/HTTP/1080/8080 and forward it to our “oops” page.
I find this beneficial for a few reasons.
1. People will not alter their settings (and royally screw things up) when they are forwarded to a page stating there is a billing issue that needs resolved.
2. The feedback has been great from this test drive. People, according to our poll, would rather be redirected/notified that their payment is late/overdue rather than being just shut off. Being shut off just causes more anger/frustration for the customer, and we try to avoid that as it will save our techs/billing/sales from being the blunt receiving end of the irritated customer.
3. I’d rather have a shutoff notice in the event I have overlooked a bill, rather than just being left to figure it out myself. (if that were the case)
You can do a redirect within your main router if it has iptables/chains
Here is our example
Please note, this will still allow all email and other types of traffic but block all http traffic.
In side our firewall chain
# mark the packets of deadbeats with 0xff
/etc/rc.d/rc.block
# then DNAT their port 80 to payup page…
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth1 -m mark --mark 0xff -p tcp --dport 80 -j DNAT --to 71.13.112.14
#SNAT the packets so they come back thru the router and not directly to blocked mac
iptables -A POSTROUTING -t nat -m mark --mark 0xff -j SNAT --to 71.12.112.1
Inside /etc/rc.d/rc.block
#! /bin/sh
iptables -F -t mangle
#---- Redirect deadbeat customers to payup webpage … using MARK 0xff
# first mark all deadbeat macs…
BLOCKED_LIST="00:0e:08:e4:bb:01 2A:00:3E:23:7C:6C "
for BLOCKED in $BLOCKED_LIST;
do
iptables -A PREROUTING -d ! 71.13.112.0/22 -t mangle -m mac --mac-source $BLOCKED -j MARK --set-mark 0xff
done
anychance that I can get the “oops page”?
Since our english is not very good 
We just confused, what must we put/write in this page.
http://www.atcyber.net/files/oops.tar.gz
You will have to change a few things, like the banner but that is what we use rather than telling them they didnt pay their bill, incase they have company over or something.
I opened the zip files, and found nothing,
How about the screenshoot?
thanks in advance
Thank You Cbotts…
we are going to try this by redirecting their DNS via the DHCP server. Has anyone tried this yet?
Where do you plan on redirecting the DNS to? If you can do DHCP reservation on a per MAC address basis then it would work, as long as you can provide custom DNS addresses as well as IP addresses.
Do you plan on setting the DNS server to a “non-DNS” server so browsing does not work?