[Commotion-discuss] Commotion Splash Screen

[Dan Staples]

Hi Dan,

Unfortunately, the splash screen currently requires internet access to
function. This is because the captive portal program intercepts and
modifies responses to clients' DNS requests, and those responses only
occur if DNS servers are available in the first place. With no internet
access, no DNS response, no splash screen.

I have worked on creating a captive portal solution for
non-internet-connected Commotion networks, and it in fact works. The
problem is that there is currently no way to have a router auto-detect
whether it is currently connected to the internet or not, and then
auto-configure its captive portal to do the right thing. If your network
suffered an internet outage, you would have to either restart DNSmasq on
each node, or reboot all the nodes, in order for the splash screen to
continue to function. And then do the same thing once internet access
was restored.

There might be a way to run a script periodically to check for internet
connectivity, and then restart DNSmasq if it detects an outage. I'll try
to work on that and see what I can do.

Do you know what versions of Firefox and Chrome didn't work with the
splash page? If you can find out, I can look into that too.

cheers,
Dan


On 09/12/2013 07:40 AM, Dan Hastings wrote:
> Yesterday we had our first large internet outage since setting up our
> first few commotion nodes.  I have our homepage in the our computer lab
> set to google.com but since we are on an open network the commotion
> splash screen comes up first.  This is great since it makes it easier
> for students to access local applications without having to memorize the
> location of the applications on the network. 
> 
> However, when our net went out the splash screen did not come up.  I was
> wondering if anyone knew a way to set the splash screen so it will come
> up regardless if their is internet access. Should the splash screen
> appear anyway regardless and am I'm missing something in the captive
> portal settings? Is there way to set the splash screen as a homepage?
> 
> Also, I've noticed that some students who are running older versions of
> Firefox and chrome in windows 7 would not be redirected to the splash
> screen and could not access the internet.  After updating their browsers
> we seemed to get to the splash screen fine to allow internet access. Not
> sure if this has been a problem in the past or of I'm missing something
> as well.
> 
> Any guidance or help would be much appreciated.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Dan
> _______________________________________________
> Commotion-discuss mailing list
> Commotion-discuss at lists.chambana.net
> https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/commotion-discuss
> 

-- 
Dan Staples

Open Technology Institute
https://commotionwireless.net
OpenPGP key: http://disman.tl/pgp.asc
Fingerprint: 2480 095D 4B16 436F 35AB 7305 F670 74ED BD86 43A9