I'm actually trying to develop a public wireless network (not business, just for educational purposes, I am studying computer science…). But I am lacking the required knowledge to acheive this goal (I am usually more into programming than network management [love Stack Overflow ;-)]).
What I want to do exactly is just like lot of cities/schools's public networks, where every adress is redirected to a login page before being able to access the internet.
My current setup is made like this:
I have my Internet connected to a wired router. This router is connected to a Switch. My personal computers are connected to this switch. I have an IIS server connected to the router.
I have a Wireless Access Point, but I don't know how to set it up to redirect the incoming IPs to my IIS. Basically I want to block all the Internet and redirect non-local requests to my local IIS (for WiFi users only, LAN should have Internet).
I thought maybe installing a DNS on my server and setting it as primary DNS in the router. Or maybe connecting WiFi to the server (with a second Network Adapter) and redirecting via firewall/proxy, but I don't know if these would theorically work, before jumping into learning how to set up one of these options…
Any help greatly appreciated!
Best Answer
What you're trying to do is implement a captive portal (as you know). One of the most popular captive portals is WiFi Dog. It's open source and should meet your needs.
You can run the captive portal off of a live CD using the ZoneCD, but some people say it's slow. Plus, I'm not sure if the settings can stand a reboot (likely not since I don't think anything is written to non volatile storage)