HTTP Re-Direct

tomw92 · 22 Mar 2011 at 19:17

Hi all,

I have recently 'acquired' a spare wireless router, a WGR614v9 to be precise and I want to do some crazy stuff with it.

Basically, I'm planning on using this as a massive file sharing toy for at uni. So when people connect and open a web browser, they will automatically be re-directed to a page that I will host on a pc within the network. It will have not internet access.

Now here is the problem. How on earth do I re-direct all http requests to my web page???

I have IIS installed on my laptop if thats any use? I currently host the web page off there.

I can't find any custom firmware for the router either.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!!

Cheers, Tom

bigredshark · 22 Mar 2011 at 20:01

Captive portal? You'll need custom firmware for that. Or you could setup a quick DNS server which pointed all requests to your web server if you fancied and then give that server out by DHCP on the router, horrible bodge of a solution though...

tomw92 · 22 Mar 2011 at 20:15

Thanks for the reply bigredshark

I can't get custom firmware for it due to it being a v9, any other model is supported by ddwrt!

And I've never done this before so any info, tutorials and links you could provide me with to do the 'horrible bodge job' would be greatly appreciated as I've never done anything like this before.

Thanks again Tom

bigredshark · 23 Mar 2011 at 12:16

I'd do it by just firing up a instance of BIND on a handy Linux box and then configure it with, off the top of my head, a local root zone and wildcards for everything pointing to the desired IP of your web server. Then no matter what they ask it for, it'll direct them to your web server (if they say... google.com, it'll say the IP of your web server, repeat indefinitely).

As you may have gathered, this isn't beginners stuff by any means and you may be better trying to acquire an access point more capable of running custom firmware instead.

There's also a myriad of reasons why this is a totally nasty solution, including windows having a tendency to cache DNS responses, so when they go back to a regular network it'll still think google is at your web server for a few hours in some circumstances. Basically, it's technically possible with what you have but I'd avoid doing it at all costs myself.