Creating and Managing Prepaid Cards in SputnikNet
How to use SputnikNet's prepaid authentication system to generate, display, download, and delete prepaid cards.
Log into SputnikNet, then navigate to the prepaid authentication system overview.
Add a new prepaid authentication system or select an existing one.
Generate a prepaid card batch.
In SputnikNet, prepaid cards are not necessarily physical cards, but user accounts with the following information:
- User ID (the login name)
- Password
- Type: either continuous or discontinuous (see below for explanation)
- Minutes: the amount of network access time allowed ("account time limit")
- Bandwidth (optional): amount of upload + download bandwidth allowed in megabytes (2^20 bytes or 1,048,576 bytes)
Note:
- "Continuous" starts the clock when the user first logs in; the clock keeps ticking continuously until the account time limit is used up regardless of whether the user is logged in or not
- "Discontinuous" starts the clock when the user first logs in; the clock ticks only when the user is logged in (has an active session); the account is valid until the account time limit is used up
- if you set both time and bandwidth limits, the account will expire when either the time or maximum bandwidth is used up, whichever comes first
- set the bandwidth limit as 0 if you want only time limits to apply
- maximum total bandwidth setting is approximately ten exabytes (ten trillion megabytes)
To create prepaid cards in SputnikNet, click "Edit Settings" from the Prepaid Authentication System menu. Fill out the fields under "Generate Paid Cards" as follows:
- Name for this batch: a unique name for the set of generated prepaid cards that will be displayed in SputnikNet, and can be used for searching, managing, and downloading cards
- Username prefix: text that is appended to the beginning of each user ID code
- Starting suffix number: starting number for this batch of prepaid cards, which will be incremented for each new card
- Number of accounts to create: the number of cards in the new batch
- Number of minutes for each account: the amount of network access time allowed by the prepaid card
- Amount of upload + download bandwidth allowed for each account, in megabytes
- Continuous/discontinuous: see above
Click "Execute" to create your new prepaid card batch.
Download your prepaid cards.
View your downloaded prepaid cards.
Open the CSV ("comma separated values") file in a spreadsheet application such as Excel to review. If you want to print the user IDs on cards, see the online documentation chapter titled "Printing Prepaid Cards".