Hello everyone,
I hope this finds you well. I live in a massive dormitory and want to adjust my home server to a Freedom box server.
Can I set up freedom box on a shared wifi network? We have to be taken to a webpage to login before usage—although I think I can also manually allow ethernet devices using their mac address.
Thank you so much for any advice you can provide.
Hello and welcome to this forum.
In my understanding, the initial setup must be done over ethernet. After software upgrades are finished (this can take a long time during which the freedombox may not respond, wait at least 1h before considering something went wrong), via the web interface (still with ethernet), you can setup a wifi connection but there is nothing to enter credentials for login inside a web page.
If you have some way to avoid the need of entering credentials on a webpage, based on MAC address, this is certainly your easiest option.
If that does not work, I have already successfully used a router running openwrt as WIFI to ethernet adapter, but never with a network that requires to login via a webpage. There might be solutions for this with openwrt but this requires more investigation, and this is one more device.
I don’t have a full solution. As a first step you could add the lynx browser and try your network login using that. Lynx is a text browser for the terminal. You could ssh to freedombox, open the web login URL from lynx and get your wifi connection established.
Looks like a good idea.
If it works but you get logged out sometimes, a further piece of a solution could be to use this suggestion to log in with a single command and create a periodic task that runs that command.