[Commotion-dev] Commotion-splash ready to roll

[Dan Staples]

Some background: the LuCI-splash captive portal software is buggy, and
has been causing instability for the DR1 testing release of
Commotion-OpenWRT. So I've set about replacing it with Nodogsplash
(http://kokoro.ucsd.edu/nodogsplash/ [thanks for the suggestion, Ben!]),
and adding a LuCI configuration page for it and a custom Commotion
splash page. It's now ready for an initial component release and further
testing.

I've tested a brand new DR1 Picostation image with Commotion-splash, and
it works great. If anyone wants a demo (in person or virtual), I can
show you tomorrow or whenever. There was one issue that I saw today, in
which nodogsplash reports using enormous amounts of memory ('VSZ') in
top, in fact sometimes more than 100% of the reported available memory.
Yet, the node still appears to have around the same amount of free
memory as other DR1 nodes not running nodogsplash, and there have been
no stability issues. So it could be just a fluke. If it doesn't cause
problems, I'm not going to worry...

I transferred ownership of the commotion-splash repo to OTI, and
submitted pull requests for commotion-openwrt, luci-commotion, and
commotion-feed, if any other OTI folks can review those.

What's left is to come up with a solution for captive-portalling when no
internet access is available (since nodogsplash can't man-in-the-middles
HTTP requests when clients can't first resolve DNS queries). Josh King
and I talked today about the possibility of running a second instance of
dnsmasq to man-in-the-middle DNS requests for preauthenticated users.
Hopefully that will work.

Anyway, good riddance to buggy luci-splash!

Dan

-- 
Dan Staples

Open Technology Institute
https://commotionwireless.net