The WiFi Emporium Blog

The PublicIP WiFi Portal Control System is comprised of either one or two components, depending on what mode you are running the PublicIP system.

There are three distinct modes you can select for the PublicIP system:

1. Open Mode
2. Free Closed Mode
3. Premium Closed Mode

Of the three distinct modes only the Premium Closed Mode requires a subscription for the zone but offers the greatest control, flexibility and reporting system and is recommended for serious commercial work.  In any of the above listed modes you can apply tweeks to the system to give it more capabilities than is built into the system…

Some tweeks allow logging in to the zonecd machine using ssh (secure shell) as a means to access the command line on the underlying linux system – you can change configuration files, write and execute scripts, check the system status and read log files using this interface.  Just as a matter of reference – most all computer systems used (and still do) a command line interface to access and control them.  It was not until about 1982 or so a GUI interface showed up on computer systems.

Other tweeks allow changing configuration files then restarting the affected processes (programs) in order to implement capabilites not built directly into the system.  One such capability is the ability to perform Reverse-NAT access. This is a fancy term that basically means you can access a device on the wireless (eth1) side of the PublicIP zonecd computer’s LAN (eth0) side.  This is definitely NOT built into the current system at this time and comes in handy if you need the ability to access a wireless access point or wireless web-cam from the Internet or your local network!

Still other tweeks allow loading software drivers or even applications into the PublicIP system without the requirement of re-authoring the CD-Rom image.  This capability allows you the ability to “install” applications that are not part of the PublicIP software set.  Of course each time you reboot the system it will have to “install” the application but if it is a small application that does not take very long.  The “down-side” of installing applications in this manner is you will need to have a large amount of RAM memory installed in the computer as the application will load only in the RAM memory of the computer!  The ability to load applications lends itself to testing the application first in order to make sure what needs to be resident in RAM and what can be resident in the read-only file system from which the PublicIP Zonecd software runs prior to re-mastering the ISO file to include the application.  Loading the application each time into RAM is not a very efficent manner of implementing the application in a LiveCD environment because of the use of the computer’s RAM for code that can reside on the read-only filesystem!

I hope this section of the Articles on the website are useful to you.  Or at least they will help spur ideas as to what can be done with the basic PublicIP system – if only as an exercise in a further understanding of how the PublicIP system works!

Gary McKinney