How To Build A WiFi HotSpot Or Entire WiFi Network Using WifiGator

NOTE: This software package system can now be installed on a Hosted VPS Account

( UPDATED: 06/02/09 )

Note: Start with just 1 Network NIC Card in your machine to do this installation.. If you want to install a second nic card for a gateway lan later, do it after the installation and setup is complete.. Set your network up like this: (chillidog is an old prgram we wrote, but this drawing still applies to the new wifigator server)

Make sure you connect this server to a router that has DHCP turned on, at least initially, in order for the server to get an ip address so you can access the web interface of it after installation in order to further change the network settings to your preferred static ip address or whatever you plan on doing in that regard. If you not do this, then you will have to use NANO to edit the files /etc/network/interfaces and /etc/resolv.conf manually in order to put your server on a static ip address. Do all of this very first thing upon installation of the CD as described below..



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Getting Started:

1) Burn the wifigator-install.iso file to a CD-R.. Burn it at the lowest possible speed, and if you are using Nero, be sure and select "Finalize Disk" and "Disk-At-Once" to give the CD a good shot at booting in almost any PC hardware..

2) Boot the installation CD in the machine you want to install the WifiGator Software onto.. The installer will launch automatically.. Go through and answer the questions as you would for any operating system install, answering what language you want, what timezone you want ( I suggest choosing Reykavik Iceland GMT for the server time because the individual site owner pages have their own timezone settings insde the wifigatro program that will adjust the time from GMT to local time for each hotspot).. Answer all of the questions and click RESTART when the installation complets.. The CD will eject and you can press enter to reboot the machine.. If the machine does not reboot automatically, just power it down and power it back up again..

3) Once the machine boots up from the hard drive for the first time after installing the CD, press CTRL-ALT-DELETE to reboot it one more time, because there are some scripts that have to run to setup the network interfaces and other things, and this will only happen on the second reboot of the machine..

4) When the machine comes up to the login prompt this time, login using the username and password you created during the CD installation.. Once logged in, enter the following command at the command prompt:

sudo sh /root/install

A menu will appear on the screen offering to install WifiGator Enterprise Billing Server.. Click OK to complete the installation of the software.. A progress bar will show during the installation.. When it finishes, a message will appear saying "Installation is Complete. Press OK to Reboot"... press Ok.... The machine will reboot.. Once again, do a second reboot when it comes up just to let all of the scripts run to setup the networking and other parts of the system..

5) When the machine boots up to the login prompt this time, you can switch over to a different pc and open a web browser and go to the following address:

http://your-server-ip/

or

http://your-server-ip/admin

user = admin
pass = admin
(Change this immediately under the SETUP tab once logged in)
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6) Once logged in, change your password, as stated above, by clicking the SETUP tab followed by CHANGE ADMIN PASSWORD. Enter your desired administrator password for the system and click on CONFIGURE.. (Note: the username will always be "admin" for the administrator and this cannot be changed.. Choose a strong password, but stay away from non-alphanumeric characters )

Next click SETUP again and click on IP ADDRES / DOMAIN NAME.. Enter the ip address of domain name of your server and click on configure.. The firmware link that will appear that is only for broadcom routers that run dd-wrt, so keep that in mind.. Open-Mesh and Mesh Connect run different firmware..


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7) Click on LOGOUT / ACTIVATE SERVER KEY.... Enter the server activation key that you got when you bought the software and click on ACTIVATE SERVER... Only do this one time.. If you need to re-activate your server, you can do it on the page that is linked there in the activation menu or on the "Resolve" page that pops up if the activations fails.. If the server is not activated within 30 minutes of booting up, it will shut itself down.. That is the key program shutting it down.. Just boot it back up and activate it within 30 minutes and it will stay running forever...

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8) Click on ACCOUNTS / MANAGE PAYPAL ACCOUNTS and change the [email protected] account to be your email address and paypal token.. You can read about how to get the paypal token farther down in this tutorial. Click on "Select Account to Edit and select the "[email protected]" address.. Alter the email to be your's and insert your token.. If you are in a different country, go to paypal and lookup the country codes and currency symbols and codes for your country..

You can also setup individual paypal accounts inside each site owner page by clicking on SETUP PAYPAL ACCOUNT..

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9 ) Click on SETUP / CREATE NEW LANDING PAGE and create your first landing page for wifi customers to see when they connect to your wifi signal.. The username and password can be given to a "Site Owner" if you have a reason for it.. This is why you create a new login name here.. You can also access the site owner pages by clicking on UTILITIES / MANAGE HOTSPOTS in the wigator administrator control panel.

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10 ) Next go to the discussion forum and read the page about connecting your Open-Mesh routers to the server or how to configure the dd-wrt firmware to connect to the system.. Click Here to go to the WifiGator Discussion Forum Now!

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11) Login to the site owner page by clicking on UTILITIES / MANAGE HOTSPOTS and click the EDIT link on the far right of the list of hotspots shown there.. This will drop you into the "Site Owner" page for this hotspot.. Now click on SETUP PAYMENT PLANS and set your plans and prices you want there.

( Note: That "nas01" hotspot that is in every system by default is a warning page to tell you when you do not have the correct NASID set in your open-mesh dashboard configuration for the captive portal.. "nas01" is the default NASID that open-mesh puts in there is you leave that field blank, so I created a hotspot with that name so you will end up at that error message you will see there.. You can of course change that to suit your needs or delete it all together. )

 

This is an example screenshot of the Set You Payment Plans page inside the hotspot control panel for a site owner. Set you desired attributes for each plan that you would like to offer on your hotspot. BW up / dn are for bandwidth throttling and BW q is for overall bandwidth usage quota for users who choose this plan.. BW Quota is a cap on their usage and is derived by the sum total of upload and download bandwidt in Mega-Bytes..

 

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12) Inside the Site Owner page, click on ADMIN OPTIONS to set the message you want customers to see regarding BW restrictions, or have them see no message at all by deleting the message there all together.. You will also find tools and links in there to manage users, create new users, whitelist mac addresses, monitor users online, monitor your router network heartbeats, etc..


 

 

 

 

 

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13) You will want to choose a new THEME for your hotspot and modify its colors and other attributes, and you will also want to edit the text contents of your user agreement, main page body, access plans page, and the "about" page..

In this software package, you will find many prebuilt templates for the hotspot pages, and these are fully customizable inside each landing page on your system. You will find templates for:

APARTMENTS

 

ASSOCIATIONS


 

COFFEE SHOPS

 

RESTAURANTS

 

MALLS

 

RESORTS

 

TROPICAL

AND MANY MORE. THAT IS JUST 1/3 OF THE THEMES IN THERE

These are just a few of the built-in themes you can choose for your hotspot. You can also modify any of these themes colors and other attributes, along with all text that is seen by the end users.

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That is the basic installation and setup procedure. There are still things to setup in your paypal account to receive payments and you should setup a domain name to point to your server ip address. You also will need to know how to use WinSCP and Putty to access and control your server.

To create a root user, so you can login to the server with ssh using putty or winscp, login as the user you created during the installation of the CD and enter the following command at the command prompt:

sudo passwd

(Enter your current user password followed by your root user password twice)

Now you can access the server at port 22 with ssh.....

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GNOME DESKTOP INSTALLATION:
The system does not have a desktop installed by default because it would limit the range of pc's that would run the server program, but there is a script built into the system that will install the Gnome Desktop on most machines.. Use this at your own risk.. It may work on some hardware and not on others..

To install the Gnome Desktop, login to the server using the username you created during installation and enter the following command at the prompt:

sudo sh /root/desktop

The system will install a bunch of packages and reboot itself automatically when it is finished.. It will reboot into your new Gmone Desktop environment...

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How to install WinSCP, and Putty for use in remotely accessing your server

Now let's install WinSCP and Putty on your WINDOWS MACHINE, so you will have the tools needed to manage your new server with.. They can be found in your own wifigator server inside the /var/www/dd-wrt/ directory...

Install both WinSCP and Putty just as you would install any Windows program... During the installation, place a shorcut icon for each program on the desktop so you can access them easily later...

Let's start with Putty... This is a simple terminal window program that will allow you to gain command prompt access to your server and your routers for configuration and management of the overall system.. When you lauch the Putty program you will see the following screen:

To access your wifigator server, simply enter the IP address of your server into the "Host Name (or IP address)" field shown above and click on "Open"... Then login with username = "root" and password = "your-root-password", unless you have already changed the password.. Then you the new one instead..

Once logged in to your WifiGator Server with Putty, you will be sitting at the same command prompt as if you were sitting at the machine itself, and you can access the machine this way from any computer on the internet...

 

Now let's launch WinSCP and see how to login to the Enchilada Server with it... When WinSCP launches you will see the following screen:

To set this up you just enter the IP address of your WifiGator server as the Hostname.. Leave port 22 there, which is the default port for ssh, which is what this uses... Username is root... Password is "your-root-password"....

NOTICE THAT I HAVE CHANGED THE SETTING FOR THE PROTOCOL TO "SCP" !!

The protocol MUST be changed to SCP for this to work... Click the Save button to save these settings so you don't have to keep punching this in every time you want to connect to your server...

Once you are logged in to your server with WinSCP, you will find that it is a complete file management system, and is a very convenient way to move files back and forth between your windows machine and your server, and it is also a very good way to edit file on the server, because there is an editor built into WinSCP.. You just right mouse click on any file and select EDIT.. Then save the file and you just modified a file on your server.. This is important, as this is how we will configure the server for connection with paypal later in the tutorial...

Security Note: Once logged in with winscp, you might want to edit the file:

/etc/ssh/sshd_config

( Change the ssh port from 22 to something like 23456... This will stop web bots from finding your server and running brute force ssh attacks on it.. The server generated a new set of ssh keys during installation that are not brute forceable, but this is a good idea anyway.. )

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Set up paypal

HOW TO SETUP YOUR PAYPAL ACCOUNT TO RECEIVE PAYMENTS

 

You should already have a PayPal Account setup, but if you do not, then do so now.. Once you have a PayPal Account, login to that account and click on "Profile".... Once in your profile, click on "Website Payment Preferences".....

 

 

Once inside the Website Payment Preferences page, turn on "Auto Return" and enter the appropriate Return URL for your WifiGator server.. This is the same URL that you just setup with Network Solutions.. Just add the http:// in front and the /confirmation.php on the end... (Note: This URL does not actually get used in a wifi paypal transaction.. Rather, the customer is automatically sent back to /wifi-1.1.1/success.php , so you can use this URL to autoreturn from and entireley different paypal payment page that you might have.. If you have no other paypal payment pages, just set it up the way I show here...)

 

 

Next you will turn on "Payment Data Transfer"... The Identity Token will not be displayed for you yet, most likely.. That will happen when you save everything at the bottom of the page after making these changes.. Once you do click save settings, come back and get this Identity token and copy and paste it into a Notepad file or something on your desktop so you can access here shortly, as we continue this tutorial... That token will need to be set into the Enchilada server, and we will cover that further down..

 

 

Turn on "PayPal Account Optional, so people can pay with credit cards, and not just PayPal.. Set the other settings I show here also...

 

Once all of that is done and you have copied your "Identity Token" to a Notepad file in your windows machine, then you can click save settings, apply, and logout from PayPal... That should all be set to go to receive money from the WiFi customers...

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HOW TO FLASH ROUTERS WITH PREBUILT FIRMWARES AND CONFIGURE THEM FOR YOUR HOTSPOT

We suggest using Open-Mesh / Robin based routers with this system, but if you want to run broadcom based routers, then here is some information to help you get them up and running.. I have built a few firmwares for you and they are preloaded in your server already.. We do not plan on supporting these routers in the future, so you will have to read and ask in the forum about setting them up..

 

This tutorial assumes that you know how to flash a router with DD-WRT, and that is probably how you found this webste, but if you do not, then go to http://www.dd-wrt.com/ and learn how to flash a router and which type of router you need and so forth before you can continue..

This system will work with any version of dd-wrt that has chillispot inside it, but using the prebuilt firmwares I provide you will solve literally hundreds of little issues and patches and settings and things that would take even the most advanced users a long time to figure out.. If you want to use your own firmware and you think you know what you are doing, then go ahead, of course, but if you use the ones I give you here, then the system will just work and it will not lock up and give your troubles.. This is the firmware that I have proven in the field and have running in at least 150 hotspots as I write this... They have been running it for 1 1/2 years and are still fine..

Open a web browser on your windows machine and go to http://your-server-ip/dd-wrt/

Inside that directory you will find prebuilt firmwares.. ( Note: your server has already built the fimrware it needs and it is built into the machine up in the Ezgator/Read me First tab. The firmware is already setup as access points and repeaters with autoap all ready to go and they will configure themselves automatically.. )

These prebuilt firmwares are made for the Broadcom Chipset routers.. these would be any router that will run the "generic" versions of DD-WRT 072808 build of SP-1... This also works with the ASUS WL520GU model routers.. Also, do not use the Backup and Restore functions on these firmwares, as they will brick your router.. The router is configured automatically anyway, so why would you need to save the configuration in the first place.. But if the idea crosses your mind to do so, then forget that idea right away... So do not do any backup or restore functions on these firmwares... (this is actually only for buffalos.. asus and linksys will not brick if you do a backup/restore to the router.. I have learned this since I originally wrote this tutorial.)

Grab the firmware from the ezgator tab of your sever. Flash that firmware to your first router.

Here are some screenshots of the basic setting you will need to change in router...

 

 

You will also want to make sure that each of your routers is on their own ip address subnet range so they do not conflict with each other on the network..

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PART 8 : DEPLOY THE NETWORK

Now let's go back to the original network diagram and set things up like the picture show...

 

You need this setup at your main location where your WifiGator server will reside, but you can also add unlimited numbers of additional access points and repeaters to this configuration, both inside this LAN and outside the local network out on the internet at large.. Your AP's and Repeaters that are out in the field will phone home and do everything just as if they we on your local LAN... THAT IS THE BEAUTY OF THIS WHOLE THING!!! Your business is now capable of operating in any location, regardless of the location of the server.. They are independent of each other..

Once you are setup like the picture above shows, the final thing we need to do is change your WifiGator server's network card from DHCP to a Static IP, as this is how you lock the server to one IP address and prepare it to become visible to the internet at large.. This is so the router can forwared all of the correct ports through to your server from the internet and know where to find the server to do so... (Note: Changing your IP address of the server will deactivate the server key you got from us, so you should get the server stabilized on a static ip address within 30 minutes of first booting it up and then activate the server key for the wifigator program.)

The ports that get forwarded to the server are as follows:

22, 80, 443, 1812, 1813

Now try accessing the server with your public IP, or your domain name that you setup with network solutions as shown below... If that works then you are finished and ready to test out the system.. If not, then you do not have your port forwards setup correctly yet..

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HOW TO SETUP YOUR NETWORK SOLUTIONS OR OTHER DOMAIN NAME PROVIDER ACCOUNT

If you do not already have one, you will probably want an internet domain name to represent your business and your hotspot on the internet at large... For example: www.wifi-is-great.com

A good place to buy a domain name and have it hosted is Network Solutions.. There are others, so if you have a different name hosting company then just apply this same information to that service...

First login to your Network Solutions account.... Then click on "Manage Domain Names".....

 

Next Click on "Manage DNS Records" at the bottom of the page, as show below....

 

Next choose the domain you wish to setup for your hotspot.. Click the checkbox to the left of it and select the "Edit DNS" button... ( You might have more than one, like me...)

 

 

Next you will see the following screen come up, which is where you will set your "Web Forwarding" for your domain to point to your IP address.

 

 

Click the "Add/Edit" button and setup your domain name and subdomains to be any way you want them to be... Just make sure you assign one of them to be the domain name of the enchilada server... As you can see, I have my main domain name there, and then I have several sub-domains defined, and they can even route to an entirely different IP address...

After you have everything set the way you want it in Network Solutions, click the "GO" button and Save and Apply settings and logout from Network Solutions, as you should be finished with this part now...

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CONCLUSION

This should have your WifiGator hotspot network up and running.. Don't bother with the paypal sandbox.. Just plug some pennies into it and test it out live, as paypal will take a penny payment and simply absorb the penny for the cost of the transaction.. That way when you see it work, you will know it is ready to go for the real world.. It will only cost a quarter to test it out... I am confident that if you did exactly as I suggest above, the system will work just fine, right from the first try..

 

Good luck with your new business and be sure and join us in the forum so we can help each other as we go.. That is where you will find most of the information on this software..