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Running YFi Hotspot Manager on Windows

Introduction: The times they are a changing
You can now have a complete hotspot system running on your Windows machine in less than an hour. Thanks to virtual environments and powerful hardware today you can run extra machines within your Windows machine. This offer you the robustness and flexibility of Linux but saving you hardware costs.

Instructions
Requirements
Item Host Operating System Two network cards VirtualBox Software Hard disk space Comment Since Windows are so widely used today, we will assume Windows7 in this instructions These instructions assume your machine has two network cards. A laptop will work since most have a LAN and WLAN network card This software will create an environment for the virtual machine to run on. At least 2Gb is recommended

Gotchas
Thanks to those who shared their experience! We give you a heads-up early here in order to ensure a pleasant experience. Each time you start the VM on a machine with different MAC addresses, Debian and Ubuntu lets udev assign a new eth number to these MACs. This will cause the network not to start up as intended. Edit /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules or simply delete this file and reboot. It will then be recreated at the next boot. On newer version of VirtualBox (or certain machines) you may get an error message on PAE kernel while the machine tries to boot. You need to enable the PEA feature in the processor settings. Click on the VM in Virtualbox and select Machine -> Settings. Select System -> Processor and tick the Extended features Enable PAE/NX checkbox. Try to start the VM again.

Schematic diagram
The following diagram shows how everything fits together

Download and install the latest VirtualBox software from this website: http://www.virtualbox.org/ Download the latest OVF file from the YFi Hotspot Manager project on SourceForge: https://sourceforge.net/projects/hotcakes/files/Virtual%20Machine%20Images/VirtualBox/ Launch the VirtualBox application. Select File -> Import Appliance. This will open a wizard that will ask you to select a OVF file to import. Select the YFi Hotspot manager OVF file which you just downloaded. After it is imported you should fine-tune the appliance. The most important part is the network interfaces.

Configuring the Network of the virtual appliance

With VirtualBox open, select the YFi Hotspot Manager virtual machine in the left panel.

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Select the Network option on the right (The virtual machine should not be running for you to select the interface) This will bring a configuration window up. Adapter 1 should be the interface you connect with to the Internet and it should be bridged (NOT NAT which is the default). In this sample (a Dell laptop) we use the Wi-Fi interface to connect to the Internet).

Adapter 2 should also be enabled and should be the interface that will serve as the captive portal. You will typically connect an access point (AP) with DHCP disabled and open security to this interface. You can also connect a switch or hub to this interface. In this sample we use the laptop's LAN interface to serve as the captive portal.

The interface used for the captive portal should also be bridged (NOT NAT which is the default).

Testing the waters

Everything is now completed and ready for us to test. Start the virtual server and connect with another machine to the interface running the captive portal. The machine you connect with should get a 10.1.0.x IP Address.

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Try to go into the Internet. You should get a login page. Log in with user dvdwalt@ri and password dvdwalt@ri

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Congratulations! Your captive portal is now up and running on Windows! ---

Determine the VM's IP Address

To determine the IP Address which was handed to the interface connecting to the Internet on the virtual machine do the following. The virtual machine will start up and show a terminal window (The VM does not have any GUI interface).

Log into this terminal window using username: system and password: admin. Issue the command ifconfig eth0. The feedback will show the IP Address which you can use in the URL to access YFi Hotspot manager web interface.

In the screen shot above the IP Address is shown as 192.168.1.104.

Accessing the YFi Hotspot Manager web application

Continuing from the previous section we will use the 192.168.1.104 IP Address. You can now simply point the browser on the Windows machine to the following URL: http://192.168.1.104/yfi. Remember to replace the 192.168.1.104 with the value relevant to your set-up. You can in fact access the YFi Hotspot Manager from any machine that is also on the same network as the Windows machine. To log into the YFi Hotspot Manager user the following user: root and password admin. Using the YFi Hotspot Manage interface you can now add users, create vouchers and monitor usage etc.

Miscellaneous info
There is a user called system and password admin that you can use to access the Linux system with. You can access the system directly using the virtual machine's console or ssh in through the network. The 10.1.0.1 IP Address can be used to access the YFi Hotspot Manager web application from the side which is running the captive portal. http://10.1.0.1/yfi/ Remember that the virtual machine has three classes of credentials. The one is used by the captive portal to give Internet access to users (dvdwalt@ri with password dvdwalt@ri). These users are managed and created using the YFi Hotspot Manager. Another is used for accessing the YFi virtual machine's web interface (root with password admin). These users are administering the YFi Hotspot Manager. The third class of user is a Linux system user on the virtual machine. (system with password admin). This user is used to log into the Ubuntu Linux machine through the terminal or ssh.

Attachments
virtual.png (66.2 KB) - added by dvdwalt 16 months ago. network_internet.png (61.1 KB) - added by dvdwalt 16 months ago. network_captive_portal.png (59.4 KB) - added by dvdwalt 16 months ago. yfi_vm.PNG (33.5 KB) - added by dvdwalt 12 months ago. yfi_vm_eth0.PNG (11.6 KB) - added by dvdwalt 12 months ago.

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