Arch Linux

faeve

Member

Registered: 2022-06-10

Posts: 12

Arch Server Captive Portal

Hello,

I want to know if this is possible and a good starting step towards making it happen.

I would like to create a Arch install that's sole purpose is being a captive portal for my network. The type that when trying to connect to WiFi it redirects to a webpage where you have to accepts terms of service before you can connect to the internet.

I'm assuming this would involve port forwarding of some sort?

If this is possible I can figure out how to do it, but I'm not sure where to start.

Thank you for your time

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,471

Website

Re: Arch Server Captive Portal

Is the arch machine the router / access point itself (running dnsmasq or similar software)?  If so, this should be trivial - so much so that if you had configured the AP you should already have you answer - so I gather this isn't likely the case.

I'd then assume there is some other router / access point.  That needs to be where this is configured.  You could have the content (e.g., webpage) that serves as the front-end to the captive portal served from your arch machine, but that's hardly relevant to the real question of setting up the captive portal which would need to be done on the router / AP.

If you don't have full control of the router, then this definitely cannot be done (which should be obvious, a random guest on a wifi network cannot takeover the network ... without some significant unethetical cracking).

---

"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

Awebb

Member

Registered: 2010-05-06

Posts: 6,688

Re: Arch Server Captive Portal

On top of Trilby's reply, hostapd is in the repos (you're likely to need some sort of RADIUS server) and UAM/captive portals exist. CoovaChilli (a fork/successor of ChilliSpot) is in the AUR. The term you'll want to examine isn't "port forwarding", it's "routing".

I'd also look into router OS's like dd-wrt. While you could use Arch and learn a lot about networking and maintaining critical infrastructure on a rolling release distro, you could also just have it do its job.