Linuxcare Founders Go Wireless

LinuxCare founders Dave Sifry, Art Tyde and Dave LaDuke have started their second company: Sputnik. Basically, they have an ISO you can download that will turn a laptop with an 802.11b card into a wireless gateway. They also wrote a user-authentication scheme that reroutes all traffic to the gateway until the user logs in via a web form. This should sound familiar to people who stay in broadband capable hotels a lot. Using this authentication technique, the software allows you to choose who can and cannot use your gateway, and in you'll be able to charge strangers for access (with Sputnik handling the billing). This will likely get some isps a wee bit upset. NewsForge has an article detailing what they are doing. Update: Turns out the authentication wasn't written by Sputnik, my bad. They use NoCatAuth

Disclaimer: I've known these guys for a long time and am pals with them, so I waited until someone else (in this case Grant at NewsForge and the NYT) put something up independently about them before linking to them.

Sputnik uses NoCat captive portal

[Anonymous Coward]

Sputnik didn't write the 'captive portal' authentication system. It's a GPL'd program called
NoCat. http://www.nocat.net/

This is actually pretty cool

[Ryan Amos]

Even with Ricochet coming back, this seems like a much better idea if it catches on. Granted, if there are no gateways, nobody can use it, but it'd be a lot faster than Ricochet and (it seems) based off actual usage, not monthly fees. It seems there's a lot of potential for abuse here, but I'd definately like to check this out, it seems like a good way to make a little extra cash (though I'm curious if there's a way to block out abusive users, I don't need any m4d h4x0rz cracking machines through my IP.) This will also probably violate a lot of ISPs ToSes, but who cares, most of us are violating them anyway. :)

Re:business model?

[oherntp]

If you actually go READ the site....

They are taking the GPL'd nocat software and adding a few touches. Some of their source mods get relesed some are sold with the premium package.

freenetworks.org

[dnoyeb]

Wake up dude. Your missing the boat. We don't need ISPs anymore.

www.freenetworks.org

authentication...

[hajmola]

'not gonna work!' my university has a similar authentication system. basically, if your MAC address has been verified by our authentication server, DHCPD will issue correct DNS servers. otherwise, all non-authenticated MACs get DNS servers that route all traffic to the "registration" page. BUT you can put in your own DNS servers and voila, you're past this security feature fairly quickly.

Re:What a breath of fresh air.

[Forrestina]

if you really want to stick it to the man.... don't sign up with some company to do it!

try hooking up with wireless groups around the country....

http://awip.truffula.net
http://personaltelco.n et
http://seattlewireless.net
http://freenetwork s.org
http://consume.net
http://free2air.org
ht tp://nycwireless.org
http://houstonwireless.org

just a few examples..... there are lots more... or start your own group.

Re:Great idea...where's the source

[Forrestina]

it can fit of course in 48 megs. it's not like it's windows...

all this is is a nice installer for a linux install, and NoCatAuth http://nocat.org which is a GPL program. so they'd damn well better be giving out source...

Re:Wireless Router Obsolete?

[techy]

You never did have to buy a wireless router. There are several Linux distributions that integrate firewall and wireless gateways. IMHO this seems like just a repackaged solution. Take a look at:

• NoCat.Net [nocat.net]
• Bering Firewall [sourceforge.net]

.. and others ...

limited 802.11b card support

[iamnetboy]

I wish they supported more than just the lame Intersil Prism II cards. I have two lucent/orinico, and a cisco aironet :( I was all set to download, but then I read the requirements [sputnik.com]. Here's hoping that more coverage will come. Its all there in the kernel and/or pcmcia-cs.

Re:This is actually pretty cool

[grantus]

The Sputnik guys suggest you check your ISP's terms of service before signing up. They're definitely *not* encouraging people to risk getting dumped by their ISPs, and far be it for me to suggest anything different.

My understanding is that this would violate some TOSes, but not others. As always, your mileage may vary.

As for keeping out bad users, every user has to sign up with Sputnik to access a Sputnik affiliate. So a spammer starts abusing your bandwidth, you report them, and Sputnik shuts them down. Not a perfect solution, but that's the way it works elsewhere, right?

Grant
NewsForge

Re:Great idea...where's the source

[Dave Sifry]

All the changes that we made are distributed on the ISO. We don't screw around with Open Source licensing, God knows we've been there, and we play by the rules.

Re:limited 802.11b card support

[Dave Sifry]

Yeah, but the problem is that you can only do Host-AP mode with the Prism 2 (and 2.5) cards. The Lucent and Cisco cards require proprietary firmware to enable this functionality.

Re:Great idea...where's the source

[Dave Sifry]

It's in the compressed filesystem in lxcr-bbc-2_0.cloop in the root directory of the ISO/CD.

To get to it, do the following:

extract_compressed_fs lxcr-bbc-2_0.cloop > /tmp/myloopfs
mkdir /tmp/fs
mount -o loop /tmp/myloopfs /tmp/fs

The filesystem will be all there in /tmp/fs

Enjoy.

We'll put things up in a tarball (and we're working on debs and rpms as well) as soon as we get our developer site up, should be before the end of the month.

GPL'ed LANRoamer has been doing this for a while

[Adam J. Richter]

LANRoamer [lanroamer.net] is a GPL'ed system that has been doing this for a while. We gave presentations on it at Bay Area Wireless User Group [bawug.org] and Sbay.org back in June, I believe, before even the NoCat project started.

If you're into "bazaar" style software development, one thing you should note is that LANRoamer does network booting and upgrade reboots. So, if you contribute a useful feature to LANRoamer, it can be widely deployed quickly (based on our stability labels and the stability level each gateway owner has selected). Also, in addition to free accounts and revenue sharing to our access point providers, we also offer free courtesy accounts for people who run open access points (not just during a free beta), partly in an effort to thank the developers and "evangelists", but also to get them involved.

Anyhow, here is the software [lanroamer.net], including the latest LANRoamer network boot floppy [lanroamer.net] or CD-ROM [lanroamer.net].

The network boot floppy currently requires that the first ethernet card be compatible with 3COM 3c59x, 8139too, Ether Express Pro 100, NE2000 PCI cards, Via Rhine, Tulip cards and PC-Net PCMCIA ethernet (the 802.11 card or the ethernet connection to your access point can be just about any card that Linux supports). Unlike NoKat (the last time I checked), LANRoamer can work behind firewalls, including NAT routers, even ones that distribute IP addresses that LANRoamer would otherwise use. Once your gateway is up, client machines can obtain addresses from your wireless gateway by DHCP and are taken to an SSL-based login page when they try to go anywhere on the web until they log in.