[isf-wifidog] getting wifidog working with olsr and spatial portal

[Jo Walsh]

On Thu, May 12, 2005 at 10:16:37AM -0400, Alexandre Carmel-Veilleux wrote:
> Auth Server. In fact I wrote one called "wifidog-auth-lite" which lives
> in our CVS and uses very minimal PHP to implement a pure splash page
> with no auth. 

Thanks very much for this; i wrote an emulation of it for our nodedb
package and it really helped me understand how the whole thing works
and where your approach materially differs from ours.
it's in http://map.wirelesslondon.info/dev/wl2_0.1_pre.tar.gz which is
a cleaned-up package which works, though it doesn't have all the
features the existing one has, there are edges missing, a lot of the
spatial stuff is quite uk-specific, i need to abstract it out.

So i'd see a situation in which hitting a link or a 'continue where i
was going' button made this open mode auth, which we do now, and the
user could always log into the service later; otherwise they would
authenticate into the network and the service at once, like you do
now; then that goes to an enriched portal page with "who's around",
access to shared calendar, *ideally* sharing/trading and other 
social services, etc.

At this point, /login/, i'd want to intercept and add the local
content from openguides, things from evnt.org we've managed to relate
to that area, etc. to do this, i'd like the mac address to be sent 
as well as the gw_id at that stage. I don't want to have to hardcode a 
gw_id; we can't run a managed network. we'll send a patch soon if you
would accept it? saul's been doing sterling work learning C.

he also got the wifidog ipkg working on the freifunk firmware. 
that seems really promising; they don't interfere with one another.
the http interface, configuration and reporting and so on, on the 
freifunk firmware is really, really nice and seems configurable 
(adding own templates, and so on); i can't urge you strongly enough to
check it out; olsr routing really works! it does not seem to be the
case, as we had feared, that each node in the mesh that was routing
your traffic would want to auth with you. this does imply that if an
olsr node without wifidog/nocatsplash running on it joins a mesh then
you associate with it, you won't run into auth, just go straight to
the net (assuming you actually are connected to the net). i don't
really have a problem with this; perhaps in the longer term something
on the internet gateway can be fixed up.

i feel as if this is going really well. we started a mailing list,
wsfii-dev, which is meant as a kind of 'sprint' particularly to brign
the edge of different projects together in the whole mode of wsfii.
you are very welcome to join it.
http://okfn.org/wsfii/wiki/WsfiiDev
http://okfn.org/wsfii/wiki/WsfiiDevelopment

er i would really like ISF to try out our nodedb/map, we will happily help
with making landsat images / other GIS data of montreal...


-jo