The last several days I’ve been completing something that I wanted to
do for over a year … integrate credit card processing into our
wireless network. My friend and I run a Wireless ISP called 80211.net and we have several Internet Cafe’s and a local residential network. We have been running NoCatAuth as the authentication and authorization system.
Several years ago, I contributed to the project by updating the LDAP
connector so that we could use an LDAP Directory as the primary user
database. I picked this direction since we could use the ‘account
expiration’ features of the directory and allow users to purchase time
on the network. I also designed and implemented a ‘cash Internet
Access coupon’ system so that the Cafe’s could sell the coupons to
customers. The user entered the coupon information and the system
would credit their account by incrementing the ‘account expiration’
date.
The coupons have been working great for years, and offer a variety of
benefits to our company, and the customers. But we wanted to
implement accepting credit cards to augment the coupons, and to allow
users to buy Internet Access when there was no one present.
We picked Paypal as the first
solution for this. And I am almost complete with the work.
It’s been fun learning how this works. I had to write some new
scripts and web pages … first to offer the credit card payment, then
to verify the user account, and then to redirect the user to Paypal …
passing some custom transaction information. Paypal has a very
simple system for passing these variables, and then offers their IPN
(Instant Payment Notification) that will call the script on my server
that adds credit to the users account.
Lastly, upon completion, Paypal will redirect the user to another one
of my scripts so that I can provide details of the transaction. I
am now working on the last two steps of this process, and hope to
complete it in the next couple of days. My folks are coming into
town today, and so I’m not sure how much time I’ll be able to spend
working on this.