Portable Cell Inititive - Captive Portal

A project by Beamlink

Landing page for new users connecting to Beamlink cell towers during natural disasters or other emergencies

Getting Started

The system works by integrating with the main Portable Cell Initiative code.

The master server, or VPN host, is a cloud server that is a gateway and control unit for the cell base stations. Install the code on that server, and use twitter_cache.py as the flask python file.

Each base station should be connected as a VPN client to the master server, and should install the code with captiveportal.py as the flask python file.

Installing

First, install python and clone this repository in a new directory (the following example is for Ubuntu or Debian). On Windows, this can be done mostly manually, from the python website and using any git tools.

sudo apt-get install python
mkdir ~/code
cd ~/code
git clone https://github.com/Ironarcher/beamlink_captiveportal.git

Activate the virtual environment with: . venv/bin/activate on Linux\OSX or venv\Scripts\activate on Windows

Choose server file (either captiveportal.py or twitter_cache.py): export FLASK_APP=captiveportal.py on Linux or set FLASK_APP=captiveportal.py on Windows

Run the development server: flask run

Now the server should be providing the webpage at http://127.0.0.1:5000 or the address listed after starting the development server

Why use a virtual environment (venv)? It keeps the dependencies seperate from the rest of the system and keeps different python environments seperate from each other. On a system running multiple web servers and pieces of software, this is important.

Using as a default page for mobile clients

The code of the Portable Cell Initiative configuration assigns new mobile connections IP addresses on the local network as 192.168.99.0/24 (range of IP addresses that are reserved).

Built with

• Flask - Lightweight web server for Python
• Tweepy - API library for accessing tweets on Python
• Requests - Make HTTP requests very easily in Python, for communicating between the master and client servers

Going further

Enable the server everytime your computer reboots by adding it to the crontab with crontab -e on Linux. At the end of the file, add `@reboot ~/code/

Use a production server like nginx and secure the firewall to only allow communication with the masterVPN and allowable mobile clients (192.168.99.0/24 for the Portable Cell Initiative configuration)