WiFiDog Reviews & Product Details

The Wifidog project was started by Île sans fil and is currently in production. Existing captive portal solutions were either almost impossible to embed ( NoCat, which relies on perl, GnuPG , OpenSSL), or only designed to display disclaimers with no access control at all (NoCatSplash and others). Wifidog is designed to have optional centralized access control, full bandwidth accounting, node heartbeating and local content specific to each hotspot. It does not rely on a javascript window, so it works with any platform with a web browser, including PDAs and cellphones. It is developed in C to make it easy to include in embedded systems (It has been designed for the Linksys WRT54G, but runs on any recent Linux platform). A typical install only takes 30kb on i386, and a fully functionnal install could be made in under 10 kb if necessary. The portal suite is mainly an authentication server coded in PHP using a PostgreSQL database. On the other side, the Wifidog gateway connects to the auth-server for directive based on information submited by users in one of the hotspots. All administration/logical stuff are in the authentication server and the gateway is only playing with gateway firewall rules to allow or deny the users access. Also of note are the extensive LBC (location-based content) management features available. There are some LBS (location-based service) features available and they continue to be an area of development.