GRASE - Hotspot/Radmin administration / News: Recent posts

The Grase Hotspot project is currently in Hiatus. Due to lack of available
time, development has ceased for now. See https://gitlab.com/grase/grase-www- portal or https://github.com/GraseHotspot/grase-www-portal if you are
interested in forking the project.

... read more

For a number of reasons, and the availability of alternative options, we will
be discontinuing the remote access VPN service. This means that from June 13th
2020 the grase-conf-openvpn package will not be available, and existing
installs will no longer connect to the VPN or be accessible remotely.

Please remove the config package by running:

sudo apt remove --purge grase-conf-openvpn... [read more](/p/grase/news/2020/06/notice--removal-of-vpn-remote-access/)

Sometimes we don't get things done in the timeframe we expect. This can lead to some embarrassing errors. Like when the GPG key for signing the APT repository expirs! Whoops.

If you are getting the following error

W: GPG error: http://packages.grasehotspot.org purewhite InRelease: The following signatures were invalid: KEYEXPIRED 1495184631

Then the GPG key you have has expired. But that's ok, because I've extended the expiry, and you just need to run a few commands to get your computer to recognise the new expiry date!... read more

And finally, 3.8.0 is released! Here is a quick run down on what's new!

• New login page! See https://grasehotspot.org/2014/05/20/new-login-coming-soon/ for more details. It's mobile friendly, and looks great. Still can be fully customised like the previous page.
• Free Access user. Auto creates an account for users. Also known as a 'Just accept Terms of Service' style login.
• See the Github Tracker for more details of what has changed! 
• You can also look at the Changelog for more details... read more

The next release is almost here! 3.8.0 Release Candidate 1 has been released in to the nightly channel, and the dev channel.
If you are on the stable channel and wish to try the RC on the dev channel, run the following commands

sed -i 's|http://packages|http://dev.packages|' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/grasehotspot.list 
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

Some of the new features to look forward to in 3.8.0 are:... read more

With a burst of energy, I've found time again to work on trying to get the work done out as a stable release! Thanks to everyone who is testing the nightly builds.

I've also realised that people don't realise how much you can customise the login screen. Have a look at https://github.com/GraseHotspot/grase-www-portal/wiki/Login-Page-Customisation-Examples for some examples! If you have an awesome customised login page, please add a screenshot! I've also written some details about how you customise the login screen https://github.com/GraseHotspot/grase-www-portal/wiki/Customising-Login-Page... read more

Some I've been working on totally rebuilding the login page. The focus has been on Mobile First. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design#Mobile_first.2C_unobtrusive_JavaScript.2C_and_progressive_enhancement and http://designshack.net/articles/css/mobilefirst/ for some information about Mobile First.

Instead of the "Mobile" login page I started developing awhile ago, that we planned on redirecting users to on mobile devices, we will now have a login page that works well in mobile devices, and still looks good on a desktop browser. I've also ripped out the old Javascript login code that was still mostly the Coova Chilli example code, and used jQuery to write simplier, cleaner code. This should remove most of the issues that mobile logins have previously had, both with javascript and with the design.... read more

Whoops. I didn't catch the fact that the repository signing key was expiring. Normally I publish a new key a few months before the old one expires so that the expiry isn't noticed. Somehow I missed it this time. For new installs, you don't need to worry, however for existing installs, you'll need to follow the below instructions to stop it warning you that it can't verify the packages.

New key id C830ED66
Key fingerprint = 6199 045D 5D07 3D98 A280 37CA 4315 7839 C830 ED66... read more

We are currently in the process of moving development to Github! The main change is from using Bzr for version management, to Git. We'll also move the issue tracker and wiki from Trac to Github as well to keep the code, issue tracker, and wiki all together!

Hopefully the move to Github will assist with people writing patches, as they can submit merge requests to easily get the changes in, with minimal effort on my behalf working out what's changed and if it breaks things.... read more

So somehow we missed the 3.7.6 release. And 3.7.7 didn't make it out of dev as we found some bugs, so here I'll try and summarise what has changed since 3.7.5!

• Fixed the 4Gb limit on data limits. This required a whole new module for Freeradius, and we are very grateful to the Yfi Hotcakes project as we used a good portion of their code. See perl_modules for an idea of what code we used.
• Fixed a security hole that could allow a user who knows the right details to login with no limits
• Fixed some display bugs due to usernames being case insensitive
• Fixed bug #93 (as well as other bugs)
• Added pagination to session monitoring, and by default only show Active sessions (#84, #90)
• Removed $ values from Data and Time limits (Vouchers will be in next version so you can sell properly instead of just having a price tied to a Mb/Minute value)
• Allow customisation of Data, Time and Bandwidth options
• Ability to lock and unlock users (#77)
• Customise DHCP range (#85)
• Fix bug #79 which is causing restarts every 5 minutes... read more

 

After a few months of being without a proper computer, my new development machine has finally arrived. (I'll post later what its specs ended up as). For some time now I've had people testing the dev versions for me, and so yesterday I pushed 3.7.5 to stable! 3.7.5 is a minor update, the changelog is below. (Just the 3.7.4-dev? changelogs, as 3.7.5 is 3.7.4-dev5 with the version number bumped)... read more

As you may have noticed, I've not posted the 3.7 release, however it has been released, back in January.
However, I was looking forward to announcing a 3.7 update soon which includes some massive improvements in database calls for the displaying users page. We went from >1000 database calls to a fixed 9 for display all the users, as well as a much faster loading time. However this release is going to be delayed now due to my computer dieing recently. Until I can replace my computer I'm very limited in what I can do. No work has been lost as everything is nicely backed up, and the hard drive is fine anyway. So now we need to wait until we can afford a replacement computer (really, just the inside components, CPU, RAM, Motherboard) and then I can transplant them into my old case and we'll be roaring away.... read more

Version 3.6 was released today. This release is just focussed on network settings. You can now change the server lan ip address, and network, as well as set your own DNS servers (or use OpenDNS with Family Shield).
Please take note, that for these changes we now have dnsmasq installed, which all the clients will use as the DNS server, and dnsmasq will do the queries to the servers you set. It WILL NOT use the dns servers from DHCP or /etc/resolv.conf, you will need to set the dns servers manually or it will default to OpenDNS Family Shield.... read more

Today Version 3.5 was released to the repository.
Main new feature is customisation of the portal login pages!!! Let me know what more can be customised and it will be!

Straight from the changelog:

grase-www-portal (3.5.1) purewhite; urgency=low

* Editing of machine accounts is now active and working (accounts no longer "locked")

-- Tim White Wed, 28 Sep 2011 11:53:41 +1000

grase-www-portal (3.5) natty; urgency=low... read more

Thank you to everyone who is using or assisting with the GRASE Hotspot!

I thought I'd give you a bit of a heads up as to what has been happening over the last few months.

Firstly, a large number of new features have been added this year, including new report graphs, dynamic groups, and internationalisation. So far we have a French translation done, and an Italian and Portuguese translation are in progress. We have also had some members of the community discuss assisting with development which will speed new feature requests up!... read more

So, MAX_INT caught me out. Of course, I couldn't work out why everything worked fine on my machine, but on another machine the exact same code was returning a negative number! I should have clued on when I was told that values over 2Gb caused problems. But why wasn't the problem showing on my machine? It's actually really simple, I'm using a 64bit machine so my "intval" function in PHP has a higher limit than on a 32bit machine. A quick google, a "bigintval" function and everything is back to normal!... read more

As my main development box is Ubuntu, it's hard to know if my packages will run on Debian. Obviously I don't want to exclude any deb based Distro, but for now I don't offer any guarantee's that the packages will run on anything other than my machine. I will however do my best to ensure it does run on both Debian and Ubuntu.

Today I fixed a "bug" preventing it running on Debian Squeeze. Turns out there is a bug in the smarty package (http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=514305) which hasn't been fixed in Squeeze yet. Quite simply, the path for the Smarty class is in a different place on Debian than Ubuntu. Ubuntu "fixed" the path to be inline with upstream Smarty, and didn't get it fixed in Debian at the same time. The fix is in Debian unstable. So rather than forcing everyone who wants to use the Hotspot on Debian Unstable, I added an if statement on the class including code to check for the Debian path, and load from there, else load from the standard location for Ubuntu. Problem bypassed!... read more

While it is possible to install this from the source code (bzr), it's not designed to be installed that way and will give you lots of trouble.
The reason it is package in .deb files is so that certain dependencies are met, and the configurations for all the pieces of required software is automatic.
Please see http://hotspot.purewhite.id.au/documentation/installation/ for installation instructions.... read more

Version 3.1 Has been released today.
From the changelog:

Basic support for translations now exists
Locale support removes need for selecting Currency
Locale support brings proper number formats for all locations
Added menu show/hide bar
Added Tabs to show groups in User List
UAM Fixes for looping login and logout link changed
Portal Configuration Options (ChilliSpot-Config)
Groups are now Dynamic
Removal of mysql_real_escape_string for mdb2->quote
Menu reorganised and grouped. Changed appearance
Machine group is now known as Computer... read more

Version 3.1 Has been released today.
From the changelog:

• Basic support for translations now exists
• Locale support removes need for selecting Currency
• Locale support brings proper number formats for all locations
• Added menu show/hide bar
• Added Tabs to show groups in User List
• UAM Fixes for looping login and logout link changed
• Portal Configuration Options (ChilliSpot-Config)
• Groups are now Dynamic
• Removal of mysql_real_escape_string for mdb2->quote
• Menu reorganised and grouped. Changed appearance
• Machine group is now known as Computer... read more

I have updated my testing site to the latest versions. A few bug fixes along the way. The code is also being pushed to bzr on sourceforge so you can now check it out and play with it. The wiki at http://hotspot.purewhite.id.au/wiki/ is ready for content to be added, it already has some information about the .deb packages.

Once I am happy with this release, I will bump the version number to 3.0 and go from there.

I have an apt repository at http://hotspot.purewhite.id.au/apt/ which I've started pushing packages to.
Initially, the package to install is grase-repo which installs the repository into /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ and also has the public key so the repository is verified.
grase-www-portal will pull in the main part of the code, the admin interface. There are a few other packages that will assist as well.
I'm also going to start pushing my bzr repo to sf.

The project is still alive. I've migrated to a Bazaar repository which seems to be serving me better than SVN was. I'll soon be pushing my local repository to the one on SF.net. I've also split the components up and created .deb packages for individual packages removing the need for complex update scripts. This will allow easier installation on .deb based systems, as well as a simple update method (check for newer versions of packages).
It also allows modularity, just installing the components you desire for your setup. I have demonstrated the latest system at a PLUG (Perth Linux Users Group) meeting a few months ago and got some good feedback.
Code will soon be here!

I am working on version 2.2.0 which is going to be a major change.
First, we are looking at a name change to RAFI.
Second, the interface is still going through major changes to make it look better, and to be more user friendly. We are also adding reports to the admin interface, and finally a "usermin" interface for users to self administer their accounts (password for example).

More to come soon...

I have finalised the 2.1.0 release, and will work on making some public code available.