Many of you have probably come to realize (like me) that the Nocatsplash package is terribly unstable and cannot be used in production. Has anyone found a resolution to the problems (Segmentation Error, port not unbinding upon quit) or an alternative solution? Personally, I am looking for a product that provides the functionality of a captive portal but without a user authentication system. A basic "splash" page with an I accept button.

m0n0wall is too large to be installed on an openwrt appliance.
Chillispot I believe requires radius authentication.

Any ideas or suggestions will be appreciated.

Thanks,
Benjamin Hecht

(Last edited by acompw on 7 Sep 2006, 02:24)

Seems Wifidog and Chillispot both support splash-only pages but still require an active Radius server.

Have you look at ewrt version of nocat? I believe they did a lot of bugfix.

Whilst it is a captive portal solution customised for the Melbourne Wireless community network, some of you may be interested in looking at MWHotspot.  It's basically a patched busybox httpd that does redirects on error pages, plus some ipatables stuff and MAC whitelists.  It is configurable via easy-to-use helper scripts so you can add MAC addresses to the whitelist to allow internet access (with different priority levels) - you aren't forced to use the Melbourne Wireless access control list (membership database).

Source code, docs and an ipk are available here:
http://melbournewireless.org.au/files/wrt54/Packages/
http://melbournewireless.org.au/wiki/?MWRPHotspot

I've played with it and found it to be very stable.  It has already provided some inspiration to the authors of DHCPSplash - a captive portal package for the Freifunk-Firmware.

http://znerol.ch/svn/freifunk-dhcpsplash/trunk/README

danversj - how do you select a zone? I press #1 in the menu but then it asks me for input for each of the 4 or 5 zones. What am I supposed to type. Then when i press 2 in the menu for configure zone, it says that a particular zone has not been configured.

During the install, my firewall file was modified and now I cannot logon to the internet or use any service. Is this normal? Thanks.

Benjamin Hecht

(Last edited by acompw on 10 Sep 2006, 00:26)

y or n

Yes it's normal   The package overwrites your firewall file.  It still is a beta package.  The script needs a bit of ironing out - sorry I should have warned about that.  You need to run the configure script, then save your settings then when you run it again it will show the zones as set.  Check out the wiki page http://melbournewireless.org.au/wiki/?MWRPHotspot for a bit more info.

It's probably locking you out of the internet because you need to configure MWHotspot to to let your MAC address through - MWHotspot probably considers you to be an unauthenticated user.

Hi!

I'm Steve, one of the folks that work on MWRP hotspot. I agree, the zones stuff is a tad confusing, so I've actually re-written a lot of this in the latest CVS version. You would need to build the ipkg yourself from the CVS checkout (just type 'make') and install it that way...

A lot of discussion has taken place lately on how to make this software portable between groups, and how to make it much easier to configure.

The one nice thing is that the same package can be used on x86 hardware as well as OpenWRT

I'm working on doing a few changes to the modified httpd at the moment - and it does conflict with the webif package (something which is annoying), however we're trying to work out a way to still get the captive portal and web interface working together, however it doesn't look good at the moment.

(Last edited by CRC on 10 Sep 2006, 13:50)

Hey CRC,
I have had to look for other solutions because the setup was a bit confusing and the wiki is a bit unclear on what to exactly do. I'm looking forward to your 1.0 release. Any expected date? How often about are cvs updates added?

Acompw

(Last edited by acompw on 10 Sep 2006, 17:48)

The CVS gets updated fairly often as there's always something going on.

The new packages are released as we get to certain goals or fix major issues.

Might be an idea to give version 0.8.6 of mwhotspot a go... I've done a lot of work on it this week to get it ready for an upcoming event. You can get the package directly at:

http://melbourne.wireless.org.au/files/ … mipsel.ipk

or, if you've already installed it once (even if you've removed it), you can just do an "ipkg update" then "ipkg install mwhotspot" and it will pull down the latest version - as we install our repository when you install the package.

If you find any issues with it, please feel free to contact me via email and I'll try to help the best I can.

OK, here's a possible alternative...

Being annoyed with Nocatsplash breaking on recent White Russian releases, and with the infrastructure complexity of Wifidog and Chilispot, I wrote a Nocatsplash replacement derived from the Wifidog code base.  Being a kind of mashup of Nocatsplash and Wifidog, it's called Nodogsplash.

I've been testing it on a mostly stock OpenWRT White Russian 0.9 system, and it's been working well here.  I'd be happy to hear if it's useful to others. 

For the ipk package, a source tarball, and some documentation, see http://kokoro.ucsd.edu/nodogsplash/.

Let me know what you think...

Thanks,

Paul
nodogsplash (at) kokoro.ucsd.edu

Hello,

Is a new package planned now that kamikaze has been released ?

Regards,
Artturi