Aug 232013
 

After making an Access Point out of a Raspberry Pi, I decided to see what else I could do with it.

One of the things I had noticed on the forums was a captive portal function. When someone connects to the Access Point, no matter where they point their web browser it will always direct them to the page hosted on the Pi.

In order to do that, we’ll need to install a web server on the Pi to host the page.
I’ve used lighttpd for this setup, so it’s a simple apt-get install lighttpd

The default directory for lighttpd is /var/www, so you can place your splash page in there.

Once lighttpd is installed, we need to make a slight change to the dnsmasq configuration.
Add the extra line below into /etc/dnsmasq.conf, replace 10.0.0.1 with the IP address of the AP if you have not followed the guide above.

address=/#/10.0.0.1

Once the file has been updated, restart dnsmasq

/etc/init.d/dnsmasq restart

Now, whenever someone connects to the access point and points their web browser to anything, it will be directed to the splash page that you have created !

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