Wifi / Captive Portal software

[vtwin@cox.net]

A buddy of mine is hosting a small conference at a local venue where they do not offer public wifi (he will have access to a wired internet connection). He'd like to set up a PC-based access point / captive portal which will present a splash screen and prompt the attendee for their pass code. I've looked around and cannot find anything Win10 based which seems to be "easy" to set up and get running (I've found a lot of software which does connection sharing, but nothing which will do a captive portal function). I suppose Linux would be okay too, as long as we could get it running in a hyper-v session. can anyone recommend a piece of software which would fit?

[Bratster]

Unless you absolutely have to use a PC based solution, which just sounds like asking for trouble,

I would get some Ubiquiti Unifi access points and a unifi cloud key for the controller. That supports running exactly what you want and more, captive portal and guest isolation etc etc.

Sent from my Pixel 2 XL using Tapatalk

[vtwin@cox.net]

Yeah, that's not really an option, and a bit overkill for what he's looking to do. I'm really locked in to finding a PC-based solution, whether it be win10 based or linux based running in a vm. Additional hardware and cloud licensing fees aren't on the table, this is a "one time" deal he's being asked to do.

[Bratster]

There's no licensing fees for the ubiquiti stuff.
it's called a cloud controller but it's a device that runs locally, nothing in the cloud and nothing you have to pay for fees for.

And you can actually run that controller as software on a computer, so you wouldn't need to buy anything for that part.

So if this is a really small event all you would need would be one access point and the controller software running on the computer, which is free.

So total cost for the equipment would be $80-$150 (USA) depending on which access point you get.


I don't work for ubiquiti or get kickbacks or anything like that, I just use their a lot of their equipment and have been happy with it.

Sent from my Pixel 2 XL using Tapatalk

[vtwin@cox.net]

well, digging around more I found a tutorial for doing this on a raspberry pi:

https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-wireless-access-point/

so I think I will lend him one of my pi-3b's to accomplish this. the internet will not be the fastest but it will do what he's looking for at the correct price-point.

further digging reveals you can assign a wifi adapter to a hyper-v session but it will not appear as a wireless device but as a standard network adapter... so I cannot adapt the tutorial to work on a debian hyper-v session. This would leave doing something natively in windows 10 as the only option.

[Jeroen3]

A raspberry pi will not be fast enough.

There is no such solution for Windows because why would you buy windows for this?

Run a VM with pfsense. If the WiFi driver is troublesome, get an Mikrotik for accesspoint and attach it via LAN.

[PlainName]

Might be worth look at pfSense: https://www.pfsense.org/

Essentially a firewall/router, does captive portal as one of many things. Run on x86 so quite common to run it up in a VM on ESXi or a PC, or just have it take over the PC. Can be a bit of a learning curve, but anything serious will have.

[vtwin@cox.net]

Might be worth look at pfSense: https://www.pfsense.org/

I'm familiar w/ pfSense, but I will run into the same issue I believe, e.g. the wifi side will not look like a wlan0 port and just an eth0/1 port, if I try to run it in a VM.... or perhaps I can repurpose an older, cheap laptop with a wifi card, I'd have to look around.

[PlainName]

Cheap laptop with WiFi would probably be a good move, but what's the issue with being able to see WiFi as a card? AFIK, captive portal works on whatever interface you designate.