Can I make every user on my network share the same homepage?
I am very new to networking but have been spending hours a day reading forums in an attempt to educate myself. I am the general manager at a small bar and restaurant and as the self-appointed network administrator I would like to set it up so that when anybody using my network (customer or staff) opens a web browser they are re-directed to The Buckskin Bar & Grill's website. Is this possible?
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But the real question is: wouldn't this be possible through OpenDNS?
Have every new client redirected to a custom homepage on first connect. For instance on a daily basis.
Personally I think this would be a great feature and I for one would willingly pay for this service and imagine it would generate you a lot of new customers looking for an easy way to redirect users of their open wifi network to their homepage.
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We are a recursive DNS service, we don't host any domains or create redirects. This would likely require an entry local to your network since different customers would want different home page redirects. Our resolvers are unaware of your internal network infrastructure so we would not be able to create/store a custom redirect exclusively for your network.
I know this is possible because may public WiFI services redirect you to a certain login page upon connection, however it is not possible with our service.
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When someone connects to my network it's logged by OpenDNS. Every connection that is made, is controled and logged by OpenDNS.
An automated system that redirects every first DNS-lookup to my preferred web address should be well possible. You have all the ingredients to make this possible.
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While OpenDNS does receive each of the DNS requests from your network, we aren't able to determine if it's the first DNS request, second, third, or so on after the user has connected to your network. All network connection initiations happen on the router level and are not seen, managed, or controlled by OpenDNS. The only service that OpenDNS is providing is answering requests like "which server is the domain facebook.com on" which we would answer "it's on 173.252.120.6, you can connect to it there (or it's on 67.215.65.130 if blocked)". This doesn't include WiFi authentication, DHCP address allocation, or choosing the homepage of the browser.
Even if OpenDNS did provide a service to give a custom DNS redirect, there would be no way to only apply this to their first opening of the browser, and would have needed to apply to every page which would essentially limit all users of your network to only be able to access your site's homepage and no other domains on the web.
Based on your description, it sounds like you're in need of a WiFi guest network login system that redirects all users after connecting to the access point to a set page that may or may not require authentication. These features are typically only available to WiFi hotspot systems for the Enterprise and wouldn't be available on home router equipment.
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Just to give you more ideas, you need (as of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15633843/wifi-splash-page-start-up-ideas-needed):
- you'll need a wifi controller that supports VLANs and can manage your clients individually
- create two VLANs: one for authenticated clients, one for guests
- in the guest VLAN configure your DNS server to redirect everyone to your "splash page" (actually these are called capture portals)
- if a user logs in into your capture portal, use a VLAN manager to dynamically put his/her MAC into the second VLAN
- in the second VLAN use a "normal" DNS server and allow all clients to use the internet
btw: consider using 802.1x...
If your router can be flashed with the alternative firmware DD-WRT, you can do it with NoCatSplash.
http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/NoCatSplash
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