[isf-wifidog] advice on getting wifidog working with our portal service?

[Jo Walsh]

Our 'portal' service uses NoCatSplash to fetch local-spatial-context
splash pages from a 'splash server'. I really want to try
experimenting with wifidog and openwrt and the freifunk firmware.
Here's an outline of our approach; i'm not a C hacker or reader
really; i would appreciate advice on how easy/hard it would be for us
to get wifidog hooked into our splash server straight away.

step 1:
- the node is set up so it requests its splash page via HTTP on boot,
  and caches it until rebooted or requests it again (every 6 hours)
 
- it asks for a URI like http://map.wirelesslondon.info/node/?mac=[mac]
  where 'mac' is the 12-char MAC address of the node without the colons.

step 2:
- if the nodedb hasn't seen that MAC address, the node gets a copy of
  the registration page, and the owner either creates a new entry in
  the nodedb or selects one that's already there. This ties the
  hardware information to the latitude and longitude in the nodedb.

step 3:
- reboot, and the node gets a splash page showing local information -
  reviews of venues mostly, event-sharing soon.

There is no concept of auth in here; nocat has a hosts_allowed or
similar where we allow openguides.org and wirelesslondon.info. Any
click on the splash/portal page redirects to a GET which automatically
logs the user in.

In future i am looking for an auth/open hybrid approach. I've heard
that lack-of-open-mode is blocking people from using wifidog, inc.
your neighbours laval-sans-fil ... but you probably get enough of
this. For now i'm happy to roll stuff out wth auth-only-mode as a
tester, and think about better integration of our backends later.

(As maybe mentioned, i'd like to use a common store for the authdb
and the nodedb, so accounts created over the web become network
accounts too - perhaps you already do that?)


-jo