[Commotion-discuss] Commotion Splash Screen
Ben West
me at benwest.name
Thu Sep 12 18:00:53 UTC 2013
Hi Dan,
I believe ROBIN's trick was to include local hostname entries for the
router, e.g. my.open-mesh.com, in into the node's dnsmasq config.
Likewise, dnsmasq supports storing a local cache on the node, which could
be enhanced/enlarged to ensure a good chance that a commonly requested URLs
(google.com, yahoo.com, etc) has entries in the local cache. Indeed, the
local cache could also be explicitly seeded on power-up with such popular
entries. I don't believe the RAM requirements for 150 entries vs 10000
entries in the local DNS cache are that severe.
This might allow nodogsplash to stand a good chance of successfully caching
users' port 80 sessions in the event of an Internet outage and display an
appropriate portal page (e.g. announcement of the outage).
This approach would assume the node normally has an Internet connection,
and that outages are infrequent.
On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 11:46 AM, Dan Staples <
danstaples at opentechinstitute.org> wrote:
> 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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> > <mailto: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
> > _______________________________________________
> > Commotion-discuss mailing list
> > Commotion-discuss at lists.chambana.net
> > <mailto:Commotion-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
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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
>
--
Ben West
me at benwest.name
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