Hi!
Very happy to be in this project. Piranha captive portal solves a well-known problem in community networks: the ability to manage vouchers and access to the internet and local services. As it says in it’s README:
It could be used in a community that wants to share an Internet connection and for that the user’s pay a fraction each, but needs the payment from everyone. So the vouchers allows to control the payments via the control of the access to Internet.
My name is Henrique and I’m currently working as a substitute teacher. My background is system administration and computer networks, so developing this project will be really challenging but I feel very comfortable doing so.
I’m also part of Coolab, a collaborative laboratory that fosters communities networks in Brazil.
Context
This project aims to develop the new release of Piranha, a package from Libremesh that enables communities networks to setup a captive portal and control/share internet access in a sustainable way. Currently Piranha is only supported in OpenWRT version 19.07.
The following are objectives of this project:
- Migrate from iptables to nftables;
- Include Piranha package on OpenWRT repository
- Make necessary changes to work with DSA on newer routers
The use of captive portals in communities enables the creation of vouchers and parental control, for example, it’s possible to disable access to social networks during night time. Since community networks can have multiple gateways to the internet, there’s a need to share information about current vouchers. This problem is solved by the shared-state package. Below is an illustration of a home user setup and a community network setup:
Acknowledgment
I would like to thanks Hiure and Illario from being my mentors on this project. Libremesh is an awesome project that enables non-technical people to deploy a mesh network in a matter of seconds.
Conclusion
I’ve never developed or upgraded a package before, i’m more into system administration, so it will be really challenging. 🙂
Thanks for reading and see you in the next post! Happy coding!