How nodogsplash works

A wireless router running OpenWrt has two or more interfaces; nodogsplash manages one of them. This will typically be br-lan, the bridge to both the wireless and wired LAN; or the wireless lan interface may be named something else if you have broken the br-lan bridge to separate the wired and wireless LAN’s.

Packet filtering

Nodogsplash considers four kinds of packets coming into the router over the managed interface. Each packet is one of these kinds:

  1. Blocked, if the MAC mechanism is block, and the source MAC address of the packet matches one listed in the BlockedMACList; or if the MAC mechanism is allow, and source MAC address of the packet does not match one listed in the AllowedMACList or the TrustedMACList. These packets are dropped.
  2. Trusted, if the source MAC address of the packet matches one listed in the TrustedMACList. By default, these packets are accepted and routed to all destination addresses and ports. If desired, this behavior can be customized by FirewallRuleSet trusted-users and FirewallRuleSet trusted- users-to-router lists in the nodogsplash.conf configuration file, or by the EmptyRuleSetPolicy trusted-users EmptyRuleSetPolicy trusted-users-to- router directives.
  3. Authenticated, if the packet’s IP and MAC source addresses have gone through the nodogsplash authentication process and has not yet expired. These packets are accepted and routed to a limited set of addresses and ports (see FirewallRuleSet authenticated-users and FirewallRuleSet users- to-router in the nodogsplash.conf configuration file).
  4. Preauthenticated. Any other packet. These packets are accepted and routed to a limited set of addresses and ports (see FirewallRuleSet preauthenticated-users and FirewallRuleSet users-to-router in the nodogsplash.conf configuration file). Any other packet is dropped, except that a packet for destination port 80 at any address is redirected to port 2050 on the router, where nodogsplash’s builtin libhttpd-based web server is listening. This begins the ‘authentication’ process. The server will serve a splash page back to the source IP address of the packet. The user clicking the appropriate link on the splash page will complete the process, causing future packets from this IP/MAC address to be marked as Authenticated until the inactive or forced timeout is reached, and its packets revert to being Preauthenticated.

Nodogsplash implements these actions by inserting rules in the router’s iptables mangle PREROUTING chain to mark packets, and by inserting rules in the nat PREROUTING, filter INPUT and filter FORWARD chains which match on those marks. Because it inserts its rules at the beginning of existing chains, nodogsplash should be insensitive to most typical existing firewall configurations.

Traffic control

Nodogsplash also optionally implements basic traffic control on its managed interface. This feature lets you specify the maximum aggregate upload and download bandwidth that can be taken by clients connected on that interface. Nodogsplash implements this functionality by enabling two intermediate queue devices (IMQ’s), one for upload and one for download, and attaching simple rate-limited HTB qdiscs to them. Rules are inserted in the router’s iptables mangle PREROUTING and POSTROUTING tables to jump to these IMQ’s. The result is simple but effective tail-drop rate limiting (no packet classification or fairness queueing is done).

Note

IMQ is not included anymore by OpenWrt Attitude Adjustment (12.09).