Introduction/First Visit

This blog is meant to track the progress of my group's progress through the service learning project for CSC300. The goal of our project is to set up a wireless network within the St Jamestown community, with the addition of a capture portal and authorization.

We first met our sponsor Darryl Hobbs on Monday March 16th, who gave us all the project details. He had told us that he wanted a way to monitor all the activity on his wireless N network, as well as enforce some authorization to the web through his own web page. At first, we weren't sure how we were going to implement this. Our group had some knowledge about networking, but this was a task that was going to require some additional tools that are not part of the usual out of the box server installation. We decided that some research was going to be needed before we dove right in.

After a few days passed by, Uzair was able to meet with some of the CDF admins who told him that the easiest approach would be set up a linux server that would act as a router, while using the wireless N router as an access point. We could then install a capture portal on top of the linux server that would capture any requests and direct them to Darryl's homepage.

On Friday March 20, we went again to visit the site to try to implement the linux router/capture portal solution. This proved to be somewhat tricky. We found a website that would give simple step by step instructions and included a script that would allow us to bridge to NICs on the Debian server to allow it to act as a router. So, one of the NICs would be connected to the cable modem, while the other would be connected to the wireless access point. We were able to set this up and get the internet to run on the server, but we had some trouble to get the access point set up properly and to enable the DHCP service on the server. We couldn't get the DHCP service started, since we were missing some information in the configuration files for the NIC interfaces. It kept giving an error where the subnet address wasn't included, but yet it was! Anyways after fumbling around with it for a few more hours we decided it was best to leave for now and do some more research for next time. We also attempted to set up an NX connection for remote access, but also ran into some troubles.