phillips321.co.uk

So we’ve all been lucky enough to have free wifi from time to time. Sometimes coffee shops offer free access. Recently in Tallinn, Estonia nearly everywhere I went I had access to free wifi. It got me thinking, all this free wifi and should I trust any of it? I knew how easy it was to set up an open wireless access point named “FreeWiFi”, but what if I wanted to pop up a disclaimer to the client first???

Step in DD-WRT and NoCatSplash. Set up was simple once DD-WRT was on the box (I was using build v16785 on a spare DIR-615-D2 I had lying around[£15ish on eBay]).

First of all set the Wireless Network Name (SSID) to something like FreeWiFi and ensure that Wireless Security is disabled. Then navigate to the Services–>Hotspot Tab and enabled NoCatSplash. Shown are the options I used:

I also wanted to set up a custom splash page, as shown in the pic above it’s located at http://www.phillips321.co.uk/splash.html.

The above settings allow anyone to connect to the AP, once connected their browser will be redirected to the splash page and only when they click the “I accept” button will they we given access to the network.

I order to ensure my own security I have plugged this network into my switch onto a seperate VLAN so no traffic can get to my local network. I have limited the bandwidth using QoS in order to ensure that anyone that does connect doesn’t rape my connection, and before I forget I have also blocked various ports from going out such as 25,22,etc….

Now at my leisure I can turn the AP on, wait for clients and sniff the traffic :-).

Note: I don’t know the legality of this; but the disclaimer hopefully protects me