tollgate README

tollgate - A captive portal software for Linux for LAN parties.

Copyright 2008-2014 Michael Farrell http://micolous.id.au.

Version 3.0.2+.

Website: http://tollgate.blackhats.net.au/

Project Status (2017)

This code isn't being actively worked on anymore, but is fairly stable. It will need updates to work with newer version of Django, as there may be security issues in the old version of it that this software still runs on.

I'm not running LAN parties much these days anymore.

Introduction

Welcome to tollgate. This is a captive portal system for Linux, designed for operating LAN parties. A lot of the concepts in the software are specific to how a LAN party operates, however you could use it for a sharehouse if you wanted, or something else.

It was originally called portal2. It managed the StreetGeek and SAGA internet connection for about two years, before I discontinued my involvement with the event. It's name was changed before public release due to the release of a video game of the same name about the same time (April 2011).

It consists of two parts, connected via dbus:

• A frontend system, which does most of the heavy lifting, including managing users and quota. It is a Django website.
• A backend system. This is only there to insulate the frontend from running programs as root directly. It also abstracts calls to the firewall, and maintains the list of unmetered and blacklisted hosts.

This software isn't based on any existing captive portal solution - it's entirely from-scratch. At the time that development started (2008) there wasn't any freely available software that did what we wanted, so I wrote one.

Documentation

Full documentation for the project is located in the docs folder and may be generated with Sphinx.

Alternatively, it is available online at: http://tollgate.rtfd.org/