Thinkpads Forum

I want to estabilish a few hotspots in my city (WiFi). I want all users who log onto one of these spots to see the page I created where I will advertise companies (this will be the only source of income). They must get this page no matter what page they might have set in their browser setting as home page.

So how can this be done?

If the target user has an IQ over 6, you can't. All you can do is tell them in your written advertisements what the login web page is. I have used such hotspots and they never override my home page (because I won't allow it). ... JD Hurst

How do you manage that? I've been to several hotels (I travel a lot) that force-feed the browser a page that often has advertising, etc, and sometimes requires the user to "log in" or some other crap. It never overrides my homepage settings or changes anything, though. I'd love to know how to beat it!

Alll you have to do is make it a form of a portal; it doesn't "over-ride" the homepage of the user (this could be construed as being invasive), but it simply presents an authentication page upon the first connection. You have to put in something like userid and password to auth properly, then you are all set and cleared for incoming and outgoing traffic.

My home page is local to the PC, and doesn't connect to anything when I run a browser, so that is probably why. ... JD Hurst

Have a look here: www.publicip.net
I have been working with this for about a week now.
It requires an old 300mhz+ computer with 128mb ram+ , 2 nics, a cdrom and a floppy drive. It does exactly what you want and offers timed logins, bandwidth restrictions, download restrictions, 4 user levels with different restrictions and more.

Alll you have to do is make it a form of a portal; it doesn't "over-ride" the homepage of the user (this could be construed as being invasive), but it simply presents an authentication page upon the first connection. You have to put in something like userid and password to auth properly, then you are all set and cleared for incoming and outgoing traffic.

That is what I want. Does anybody know how something like this can be done? Is such feature software or hardware related? Is there any wireless equipement (i.e. mash networking gear, wireless routers and access points etc.) which guarantee this?

Read above. There are a ton of projects dedicated to this. It's just a DNS hack. Really with enough experience integrating software with BIND could do it (IMHO BIND is a giant pain in the butt).

Of course that doesn't guarantee people will pay for Wifi... historically these models don't seem to last to long, as only a few business users will pay for it (since their company essentially does). So I wouldn't invest to much in the beginning. This business is not exactly like striking oil.

Not to mention quite often free wifi pops up in the same area sponsored by someone else.