The Active Portal is a set of services that run on the gateway machine that sits between the wireless access point and the Internet. The access point may be external, such as an Apple Airport Base Station, or internal, such as a Linux Box with 802.11 card. Each Active Portal may serve one or many wireless access points.

The Active Portal provides network identification, user acceptance of an AUP, reverse intrusion detection, traffic shaping, and logging functions. Optional parts are a caching DNS server, and web proxy caching.

Source: http://wiki.personaltelco.net/ActivePortal

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