Make it easy to connect to a home LAN

[rgaudin]

⚠️ opened by @Popolechien in the wrong repo (can't be transferred)

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This is user feedback we got and I thought sounded interesting

I would love to be able to access this one-way through my home LAN while it's connected to the internet, without it exposing the http/https ports to access websites through the hotspot. I know that will be configurable but it would be great to have one-way firewall set up by default. Not sure if thats possible, proably showing my technical naievity. Essentially, I'd love to be able to access the wiki snapshot I have locally, and even serve it as a website if i choose to through my LAN and port forwarding , but not make my internet connection available through the kiwix hotspot's open wifi which is what happened when I hooked a LAN cable up to my router....

[rgaudin]

Very difficult to read ; here's a summary of what I understood. @Popolechien let me know if I got it right.

ATM, connecting to LAN assumes the LAN has Internet connectivity and allows WiFi clients to access the Internet.

The request is about the ability to change this behavior so LAN-connected users can access the Hotspot as well and not share the Internet connection (if it's available).

It's possible but it involves multiple parameters due to the very flexible nature of all this: internet or not ? DHCP or not ? etc.
The main difficulty in non-DHCP scenarios is the fact that we rely on DNS.
That's what would make the second part of the request (giving it access over internet via NAT/forwarding) but there it can be managed externally.

I think it's a good feature that requires the AdminUI. I think we've had only a couple such requests over the years.

[kelson42]

The technical solution should be discussed very carefuly IMHO.

[Popolechien]

Added info from user:

When I connected the raspberry pi with the Kiwix Hotspot image using a LAN cable to my router, it was allowing clients to access web pages via the Hotspot's wifi connection. I guess I could log into the Pi and change the settings to put a wifi password on the hotspot, but I wasn't sure what the sudo username/password was etc to be able to do that.

I've flagged this issue to them so if there's any additional clarification needed hopefully they'll be able to address it.

[kelson42]

Like @rgaudin has written, the most serious issue I see is that the web services of thw hotapot assume the browser relies on both DNS and DHCP services. In a context of a pre-existing local network, usually these 2 services are provided by the modem/router already there. Therefore this can not work easily like it work voa Wi-Fi... at least not without serious changes. I believe it makes sense to discuss these changes.