[Untitled] - a lightweight hotspot+captive solution

[Untitled] is a lightweight and simple solution to provide wireless internet access with an integrated captive portal.

Installing

To create an installer, run the following commands:

sudo apt-get install nodejs
node createinstaller.js

Before creating the installer, please edit profiles.json to ensure that the whitelist and the blacklist fit your needs. The whitelist profile contains the global whitelist, and the blacklist profile contains the global blacklist, both of which are applied to every user. If you don't need them, simply replace the default whitelist with "whitelist": [] and the default blacklist with "blacklist": [].

This will create a standalone installer named install.sh, and an uninstaller named uninstall.sh. To install [Untitled] on a machine, copy install.sh to the target machine and then run

sudo bash install.sh

Superuser privileges are needed in order to install packages and to create files in /usr/bin.

Uninstalling

The uninstaller, uninstall.sh is created along with the installer. To uninstall [Untitled], simply copy uninstall.sh to the device and execute it:

sudo bash uninstall.sh

Using the hotspot

To use the program, run

sudo hotspot configure

and follow the instructions. When you're done, run

sudo hotspot start

This will create an hotspot with very basic functionality (all requests are redirected to the captive portal, which is hosted on the same machine as the hotspot on port 80).

If you wish to use the integrated captive portal, run sudo nodejs /usr/bin/server.js. For more information, check out the chapter "Using the captive portal".

To stop the hotspot, run

sudo hotspot stop

Using the portal

[Untitled] features a simple captive portal written in node.js, as an example. It uses profiles.json as a list of profiles, each defining a set of allowed hosts and ports, for example:

{
	"whitelist": [
		{
			"host": "wikipedia.org",
			"port": "80"
		},
		{
			"host": "wikipedia.org",
			"port": "443"
		}
	],
	"afilini-goes-onn": [
		{
			"host": "the-beat-goes-onn.tumblr.com",
			"port": "80"
		},
		{
			"host": "afilini.tumblr.com",
			"port": "80"
		},
		{
			"host": "blog.afilini.com",
			"port": "80"
		}
	]
}

The example above defines the special profile whitelist, representing the global whitelist (see the paragraph "Installing"), which allows connections to wikipedia.org on ports 80 and 443 (respectively, the default ports for http and https), and the normal profile afilini-goes-onn, which unlocks the-beat-goes-onn.tumblr-com, afilini.tumblr.com and blog.afilini.com on port 80. Note that you can specify either a host, a port, or both.

Issuing tokens

[Untitled] works using tokens: on connecting, users enter a code, which corresponds to a server-side token. The token allows them to use preset profiles, for a preset duration since they entered the code.
To issue a token, run:

sudo ./issueToken.js <profile> [<duration>]

The square brackets around <duration> mean the duration can be omitted. Note that although "infinite-lasting" tokens are supported, they haven't been tested yet.

The program will output something like this:

Code: ielghmlb
Profile: afilini-goes-onn
Valid for 1440 minutes (24 hours, 1 days)