[Commotion-discuss] Commotion Splash Screen

[Dan Staples]

The captive portal can't intercept port 80 requests before DNS requests
because the client doesn't actually make a port 80 HTTP request until
they get a DNS resolution of the site they are trying to reach.

I would be really curious to know how ROBIN captive portaled during
internet outages.

On 09/12/2013 12:02 PM, Ben West wrote:
> 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 <http://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
> <mailto: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 <http://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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>     >
> 
>     --
>     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
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> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Ben West
> me at benwest.name <mailto:me at benwest.name>

-- 
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