[Commotion-discuss] Commotion Splash Screen

[Ben West]

Hi All,

Is nodogsplash still being investigated as a stand-alone splash page
solution?  My understanding is that nodog would intercept users' port 80
sessions before any DNS queries were actually launched.

I realize the version of nodog available until just recently was lacking
key bandwidth throttling features, but I can share that a new nodog was
released a few days ago.  The Changelog, unfortunately, doesn't indicate
that throttling has yet been ported to the new 3.x kernel.
https://github.com/nodogsplash/nodogsplash/releases/tag/v0.9_beta9.9.8

Anyway, on the old ROBIN firmware, the nodog captive portal would indeed
continue to display even in case of Internet outage, since the portal
content is stored locally on the node.  I had used that very capability to
(manually) adjust content on nodes' local splash page and announce
outages.  This unfortunately didn't work out as a reliable means to
announce outages, since the ROBIN firmware itself would later detect the
Internet outage and disable the nodes' AP entirely (a feature which
couldn't be disabled, and got annoying very quickly).

As for a node detecting whether it has Internet access, I think Freifunk
scripted solution for that in the freifunk-gwcheck package.  Unfortunately,
luci,subsignal.org appears to be down now, so I can't cite the source code.

This appears to be clone:
https://dev.openwrt.org.cn/browser/feeds/luci/trunk/luci/luci/contrib/package/freifunk-gwcheck



On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 7:24 AM, Dan Staples <
danstaples at opentechinstitute.org> wrote:

> 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
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Commotion-discuss at lists.chambana.net
> > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/commotion-discuss
> >
>
> --
> Dan Staples
>
> Open Technology Institute
> https://commotionwireless.net
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>



-- 
Ben West
me at benwest.name
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