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I was looking for a way to display a usage agreement page in browsers that users must agree to before they are allowed to access the internet. This would be for users on public computers and public/open wifi.

I'm using a sonicwall firewall which does support this feature, however, there is a rediculously low character limit which makes it impractical to use.

I thought about setting the browser's homepage to a usage agreement page, but that can easily be bypassed by navigating to somewhere else.

Are there any other approaches that may be worth considering?

There is currently no server in place on the public network, though I can set one up if need be.

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  • This could surely be accomplished with a proxy server. Mar 20, 2012 at 13:17
  • Can Windows Server 2008 (R1, not R2) act as a proxy server? How would you be able to set up an agreement page that can't be bypassed without being agreed to?
    – Force Flow
    Mar 20, 2012 at 13:22
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    What you're looking for is a captive portal and IIS can do this in server 2008. There are a lot of examples out there on the web. Also serverfault.com/questions/119525/…
    – resmon6
    Mar 20, 2012 at 13:25

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I think what you're looking for is "Captive Portal". You should look for some kind of routing/proxy server open source package that will be used as the gateway/router for this guest network and provide it access to the Internet.

Take a look at products like this: http://dev.wifidog.org/

That's for wireless specifically, but I see no reason why it couldn't also secure a wired guest on the same subnet. I can't architect the entire solution for you, but in order to redirect users you need a fulcrum at the gateway, so I would suggest letting some other device do the routing here, it's going to be a combination of packages.

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  • I found CoovaAP coova.org/CoovaAP , which featuers a captive portal. Getting a wireless router, using it as the gateway, and installing the CoovaAP firmware looks like a possibility that doesn't look too difficult to implement.
    – Force Flow
    Mar 20, 2012 at 15:39
  • CoovaAP didn't end up working so well. The firmware appeared buggy and wouldn't always save settings when saved and applied.
    – Force Flow
    Apr 4, 2012 at 20:48

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