[Commotion-discuss] Commotion-discuss Digest, Vol 12, Issue 10
Dan Hastings
dhastings at abaarsotech.org
Fri Sep 13 13:03:35 UTC 2013
Thanks for the feedback. I've installed gw-check just have no idea how I
could write a script to have it work with dnsmasq so everytime there is
an outage dnsmasq would restart.
How might I go about adding local entries to the dnsmasq config? Our
outages are fairly infrequent so maybe this is a good solution.
I'll look into what versions of chrome/Firefox were giving me trouble.
Not positive but I think it may have been with versions 20 or 21.
On 9/12/13 10:20 PM, commotion-discuss-request at lists.chambana.net wrote:
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> Today's Topics:
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> 1. Re: Commotion Splash Screen (Ben West)
> 2. Re: Commotion Splash Screen (Dan Staples)
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> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 13:00:53 -0500
> From: Ben West <me at benwest.name>
> To: Dan Staples <danstaples at opentechinstitute.org>
> Cc: commotion-discuss <commotion-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
> Subject: Re: [Commotion-discuss] Commotion Splash Screen
> Message-ID:
> <CADSh-SOo=155B_XVQVgoy_CzgN+gbohAHisxj8uPJFGgXBEwUw at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> 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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>>> > Commotion-discuss at lists.chambana.net
>>> <mailto:Commotion-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
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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
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Commotion-discuss mailing list
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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
>>
>
>
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