[Commotion-discuss] Recent use of a Commotion v1.1 node at hacker space fundraiser

[Ben West]

I ended up being out of town on the day of, but I lent a Nanostation M2
flashed with the pre-compiled image for Commotion Grumpy Cat v1.1 for use
this weekend at a local hacker space's fundraiser (http://archreactor.org).
I originally set up 2 Nanos, not knowing if the wired uplink would be a
close enough to the venue location for one or two nodes, but they ended up
only needing one.

Per request, I manually edited /etc/config/{dhcp,firewall,network,wireless}
to include an additional "lanb" network and WPA2 SSID, w/o captive portal,
for use by the festival organizers.  Specifically, so they could use Square
dongles on some tablets to collect ticket sales and whatnot.  I also edited
/etc/config/qos to set 10M/1M down/up limits on the wan interface, per
request from the venue providing the uplink.

The single Nanostation worked very well for this purpose, and updating
minor details like nodogsplash portal welcome blurb via the web UI didn't
appear to clobber the manual edits I had made to config files.

Positive feedback:
- The Quickstart setup for both Nanos went just fune, i.e. connecting to
the eth0 port via DHCP lease after flashing and then browsing to
https://thisnode.
- The additional lanb network/SSID I added to each node maintained its
NAT/routing just fine, even when the nodes toggled their repeater/gateway
roles based on which was connected to the wired uplink.
- Updating the captive portal welcome blurb via https://thisnode was very
straightforward for the festival organizer.

Issue observed:
- The nodogsplash captive portal would timeout occasionally on initial
capture of the client's port 80 session (i.e. no portal page would appear),
or clicking on the Internet icon wouldn't reliably follow through.  In my
own testing, the couple times I observed the portal page display, but
click-thru stick, actual Internet access appeared to be working thereafter
(i.e. I could open another browser tab to wherever).  On the times when I
observed the initial portal page not disaply, I did have to open additional
browser tabs to get the portal page to download.  I think this is a known
issue.

Also, I can confirm from this particular festival, and other similar
community events where a customizable portal is desired, the request for a
2nd private SSID is common.

Finally, the hacker space folks were very happy with how the node worked
for them!  No comments from event-goers about any problems using the public
SSID / portal.

-- 
Ben West
http://gowasabi.net
ben at gowasabi.net
314-246-9434
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/commotion-discuss/attachments/20150121/0caa51fe/attachment.html>