After 3 hours of sweating, crawling under desks, and fiddling, I’m typing this entry from the Mike’s Kitchen in Northgate, where the new Funky Penguin Hotspot is now up and running. (Credit card payments are not exactly working yet, but I can fix that on the back-end)
It’s really exciting.. this is our first commercial deployment, and it was a big rush to get it ready before month-end weekend.
What I learned in this process:
- DD-WRT takes a long time to re-initialize everything after a small change.
- If you enter bogus chillispot config details, DD-WRT won’t warn you, but chilli won’t start.
- Don’t assume anything about the site’s network topography, and bring lots of spare cables!
I don’t completely get how ChilliSpot, DNS, and DNSMasq work together. My /etc/resolv.conf file on the DD-WRT box reflects its own IP as a nameserver. If I try to use that IP in chilli, however, no juice. So I have to use my parent DNS server in chilli’s config, and then it seems to work. A bit counter-intuitive, in my mind, because I don’t necessarily want my hotspot users to know my parent DNS IP. (It gives away the topology of the local LAN).
I’m going to have to contact a chilli expert to explain this one to me - maybe I’ve missed something 
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