On a recent project, we had the benefit of working with Ruckus Wireless access points in building captive portal and secure wireless networks. To illustrate how to use such hardware with CoovaChilli, consider the following example where we are using the Ruckus ZoneFlex 2925 and a simple Ubuntu PC running the CoovaChilli open-source access controller.

In the forum and elsewhere, we have seen people asking for CoovaChilli for their Ubiquiti routers. Of course, one easy way to use CoovaChilli is to be using the open-mesh / ROBIN firmware. Another way is to build CoovaChilli right into the Ubiquiti firmware using the Ubiquiti AirOS SDK.

In DHCP Discovery, we explored the DHCP protocol and the kind of information the client device reveals about itself. DHCP fingerprinting is taking that information in order to classify the operating system and/or vendor of the device. The technique is finding it's way into commercial applications, CoovaRADIUS included, but, it's easy to do yourself too; here's how.

RADIUS is a protocol "for carrying authentication, authorization, and configuration information between a Network Access Server (NAS) which desires to authenticate its links and a shared Authentication Server (AS)." RADIUS uses UDP packets that carry one or more RADIUS attributes.

There are several possible authentication protocols that can run within RADIUS. The simplest is PAP, where the user password is transmitted encoded with the shared secret between the NAS and AS.

The Neo Freerunner from Openmoko is addictive. I would call it a "phone," but I haven't really used that feature much yet. It's simply a nice, very nice, pocket sized Linux system with touch-screen, GPRS, GPS, and, of course, Wi-Fi. My Freerunner came with Google Android on it, but I wanted to start out with Openmoko's own firmware. With the latest version of their software, I found most features of the phone operational, complete with a nice soft keyboard. It is also very easy to build applications for the phone, using standard GNU tools and GUI building in X/GTK.

Writing open-source for system integrators is a challenge. To some extent, your users are your own competitors. But, why?

The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) is a protocol used by computers, or any network device, to automatically obtain an IP address and other related settings in order to access a network. Similar to RADIUS, DHCP is based on UDP requests and responses that can carry a wide range of attributes, or options as they are called in DHCP.

JRadius 1.0.0 has  been released. JRadius is both a client and server Java framework for RADIUS. In the server context, it typically runs as a standalone Java server accessed by the standard rlm_jradius module in the FreeRADIUS server. FreeRADIUS connects to JRadius similarly to how it connects to a SQL server, but this module allows for complete RADIUS logic handling in Java.

CoovaChilli, the open-source access controller, is getting better all the time. Thanks go out to the growing forum, mailing list, and IRC communities for valuable patches and ideas! There is no wonder, then, why CoovaChilli continues to be used in more networks; municipal, mesh, and individual. I hear that Moovera is using it, and I have been helping out Open-mesh.com in integrating it.

Drupal "Hotspot" captive portal module