Hosting Lan Website

My Objective:
1. Host website on a wireless lan. Specifically a authorization/identification page.
2. Force connection to this site from inside the network.

My Tools:
Latest win distro of Apache web server.
Linksys WRT54G wireless router

What I've tried:
Setup the website just fine. Assinged it to 192.168.1.100:8080. Then I configured my router to port foward all connections besides my own to the address. (sloppy i know, but i wanted to check it real quick) Jumped on a buddy's computer, and it didnt work. After lurking the net for some help I figured out that my port forwarding AND loopback function did not work on my router. Turns out that my firmware had a huge bug in it. I came across a rather interesting story about crazy programmer,Sveasoft, harassing a website owner for posting firmware code that is under GPL.
I know that I am not expirenced enough to be going around flashing firmware here and there, but I will not rule out this option completely. I do not believe I will be able to accomplish my objective with just my router.

I can only think of one possible way to get this to work. I can create and host my own DNS server, and point my router to it. This I am not too froggy about, considering that the webserver was more than I have ever done before. However, I will do what is necessary to achieve my goal.

My Question:
Is there a easier way to do this? I certainly would like to know before becoming my own little ISP eheh.

Hey Hey,


I mentioned it to someone else looking for AAA software. You might want to check into netreg... the SouthWest version is the easier version to setup but the Carnegie-Mellon (sp?) definately provides more functionality...

Basically you run a dhcp/dns server.. The DHCP server assigns a set of "restricted/bad" ip addresses along with the address of your "rogue" dns server. The dns server points them to your webserver and only your webserver which is running the netreg software. After they authenticate (flat file, mysql, ldap (depending on what you setup)), their MAC address is moved to an allowed list on the dhcp server config and if they reboot (or wait one minute and release/renew) then when they obtain their new IP form the DHCP server they get a "good" ip address with the real DNS servers.

It's a fairly simple setup.... and I can help ya out with the setup if you need any assistance. This software is normally run on linux, but I believe there are ports of all the involved software (apache, perl) and I"m pretty sure there are windows ports of bind and dhcpd.

Anyways... Good Luck

Peace,
HT