How do I force a homepage across a network?

April 22, 2007 4:13 PM

How do I force all clients on a network to view a webpage of my choice whenever they try to access the internet?

We're running a LAN party this friday, and won't have Internet access, so we'd like to setup a webpage for patches and so on that woulid be accessible whenever someone tries to access the Internet. I've seen registration pages for WiFi that work this way.... whenever you try to access any webpage at all, it redirects you. How is this done? Is it a DNS trick? We're going to be using a Windows 2000 server as a DHCP and DNS server if that makes any difference.

posted by fvox13 to computers & internet (6 comments total)

What you want is a captive portal system. Have a look at Chillispot and similar...
posted by pompomtom at 4:21 PM on April 22, 2007

Wikipedia's Captive Portal page, which includes likns to some captive portal software.
posted by stovenator at 4:34 PM on April 22, 2007

set the default gateway option in dhcp to point to the machine you'd like to provide the patch page, and run a webserver there.
posted by rhizome at 8:13 PM on April 22, 2007

oops, nevermind.
posted by rhizome at 8:13 PM on April 22, 2007

Thanks for the help, everyone. I dediced to try out rhizome's option, though, given that this is a Win2K environment, and the rest of those products seem to be for linux or expensive.
posted by fvox13 at 8:48 PM on April 22, 2007

I don't believe rhizome's suggestion will work for you - a default gateway is for routing purposes, it won't force web requests to hit that server. It just tells other computers to use it as a router for all external requests. If you don't have routing software on that computer, this will just fail. If you do, you still have to configure routing rules to route the request back to itself to serve the web page.

Something like DNS Redirector would seem to fit your needs and is not too expensive ($40). If you do stuff like this more often (and have the expertise), it would probably be worth setting up Linux on a low-end box somewhere on your network - there's tons of network tools like this freely available for it.
posted by chundo at 7:36 AM on April 23, 2007