Eric Martin's picture

First off, I want to thank TurnKey Linux for being a lifesaver!

I have recently come from a Microsoft environment, and decided to branch out on my own.

To subvert the cost of licensing, I decided to switch over to a virtualized opensoure platform.

Utilizing VMWare ESXi and Turnkey Linux along with ClearOS, I was able to do just that.

I have successfully consolidated everything and it is much more efficient.

The kicker is, I have no linux knowledge, so it has been a wonderful experience for me.

 

Now, I have come to an impass, and I'd like to see if I can get some help.

I would like to implement CoovaChilli with Free Radius 2 and the Drupal Hotspot Module

I have installed Turnkey Core and installed the freeradius package but my knowledge stops there.

Has anyone played with CoovaChilli previously?  I'd love to get some help or even hire someone to get this up and running for me with a little training.

 

Thanks!

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Jeremy Davis's picture

Hey there Eric. I have no idea at all really and have little (read: nothing) to do with any of the stuff you are talking about. But a quick bit of scouting about has bought some interesting stuff up.

FreeRADIUS 2.1.8 is available from the Ubuntu repos so can be installed easily like this (FYI TKL v11.x is based on Ubuntu 10.04 server):

apt-get update
apt-get install freeradius

There is a little info here about setting up CoovaChilli and RADIUS to play nice. CoovaChilli .debs (a Debian/Ubuntu installer package) are available here (you'll want one of the versions available for Ubuntu 10.04). The easiest way IMO would be to download direct to your machine using wget, then installed with dpkg, so for example:

wget http://ap.coova.org/chilli/coova-chilli_1.2.5_i386.deb
dpkg -i coova-chilli_1.2.5_i386.deb

Info for configuring CoovaChilli and Drupal is here. In fact the Coova website looks pretty useful all round really.

This looks like a quite cool setup potentially and I'd love to hear more about how you go with it. From my brief investigation it seems that it should all work from the TKL Drupal appliance. Be great if you can document your progress and keep us posted. At a glance all this stuff looks Open Source so even though it's quite a specialised setup, it could be a candidate for a TKL appliance of it's own. Even if the devs don't think so, if you do a good enough job getting it going, we could do an unofficial community release (initially just using a TKLPatch would probably be the go).

Good luck and hope to hear more soon! :)

Greg Haberek's picture

I've built several CoovaChilli+RADIUS captive portals. I also wrote my own front-end for managing the MySQL database that the RADIUS server feeds from (can't share that, property of our company).

This is the guide I've used in the past: WifiDocs/CoovaChilli. Although at this point I've done so many times, it's practically second nature: install radius, install CoovaChilli, configure RADIUS secret and MySQL backend, configure CoovaChilli to use RADIUS, test, and enjoy!

Hopefully I'll have time soon to build a TKLpatch for CoovaChilli+FreeRADIUS+Hotcakes (YFi Hotspot Manager). They're a killer combo for hotspot management. (I've never used the Drupal module.)

I'd be happy to answer any questions you may have.

-Greg

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