Monowall and Captive Portal

Timothy MeadeEric Stolten

What Is Monowall?

Embedded firewall software package m0n0wall is based on a bare-bones version

of FreeBSD, along with a web server, PHP and a few other utilities.

The entire system configuration is stored in one single XML text file.

What Is a Captive Portal?

The captive portal is a web page that users/clients are forced to visit before they are granted access to the internet.

At this page they are asked to enter there user name and password.

This username and password are passed along to the RADIUS server

The flow of data

Wireless User

AP

Monowall w/ DHCP

Radius

NIS Server

How to Build a Monowall System Basic things you need:

Null modem cable Compact Flash media 8 meg+ Embedded PC system

Soekris (who we used) PC engines

Access point for wireless

Creating monowall

The first thing you need to do is download an image of monowall and burn it onto your CF card with physdiskwrite.Exe.

First Boot

For the first boot. Connect the null modem cable to the soekris box and power it on.

Once fully booted connect the lan interface to the switch. Load a web browser and input http://192.168.1.1 to login to the web GUI of monowall.

The Login/password originally was admin/mono.

Wan Configuration

Lan Configuration

Captive Portal configuration

DHCP Setup

D-link Router/AP Configuration Assigned the IP 192.168.0.2 Disabled DHCP Changed SSID (service set identifier) to

“354AP” Password for admin and user changed to

mono354

Physical Connection to the Network.

Monowall

Lab 1DHCP

Lab2 NIS

Gateway Lab 3Lab 4RADIUS

311 311 311 311

Switches

AP Wireless userLan port

WAN port

Why It Took So Long Almost every time you mess up the

configuration you have to reload the configuration file.

Not using an AP Cant bridge lan/opt1 interfaces and run captive

portal Misuse of the AP

From monowall a connection was made to the WAN port of the AP it should have been on the switch side.

Other Plans?

Changing the DHCP pool from 192.168.X.X to a range within our subnet.