Weekend Project: Set Up Safe Guest Wi-Fi with Linux

“The holiday season is upon us, and you know what that means:
relatives coming over wanting to use your WiFi. If you’d like to
find a solution somewhere between “run an open, unsecured AP” and
“hand out your WPA2 password to people who write things like that
down on sticky notes” then setting up a captive portal is a
convenient option.

“There are several open source captive portals to choose from
for your Linux box, including NoCat, HotSpotPA, PacketFence, and
ChilliSpot. Unless you have time to explore the features and
options, however, a simple, actively-developed solution like
WiFiDog is probably the best bet. WiFiDog will run on any Linux
distribution, and is an optional package on most of the embedded
Linux router firmware projects (like OpenWRT and DD-WRT).

“Obviously the task that a captive portal package performs
depends on the presence of two (or more) network interfaces on the
machine; the portal intercepts connections originating on the
restricted interface, performs some sort of authentication, and
subsequently begins routing traffic to the unrestricted interface,
whether it is also on the LAN or is a WAN port”

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