Byzantium/Byzantium — Issue #61: Captive portal.
Author: virtadpt
Created: 2011-11-14 05:24:05+00:00
State: open
Labels: Request for comments, System services

Something that's been on the table for a while has been the captive portal: the first thing the user sees when they access the mesh and try to access a site (see issue #41) to tell them what sort of wireless network they're on, warn them to use proper OPSEC, and present to them a list of services that their "home" mesh node runs and the services the "home" mesh node knows about.

There are a couple of options on the table.

WifiDog (http://dev.wifidog.org/) is known, widely deployed, and kind of a pain because we use IP aliasing (virtual network interfaces). Sitwon has been working with it.

NoCat (http://nocat.net/) has potential, but we really haven't done much with it yet.

Captive-Portal (http://search.cpan.org/~gaissmai/Captive-Portal/) is a Perl module that makes it easy to build a captive portal. My notes are here (http://wiki.hacdc.org/index.php/Dependencies) and I figured out how to install and package it for Porteus Linux (at the very end of my wiki page). We might be able to use it to write a custom captive portal app because it provides the bare minimum of functionality to do so. However, it's written in Perl and needs to be run as a fCGI script.