Looking to start a project, any advice is appreciated!

Hey everyone! My friends and I at college have been looking into pirateboxes recently, and we had an idea of setting up a piratebox in the dorms so that students can chat and exchange files and media. However, we ran into a few snags. First, our dorms were built in the 1960's and as such are made out of dense concrete block that stops most wifi signals, even within the same floor, connecting to a piratebox across the hall is almost impossible. Second, since our internet is provided to us by the school via hardwired ports in the wall, many students bring their own routers, so every wifi channel is terribly congested.

With these limitations in mind, we were wondering whether it would be possible to plug a piratebox into the schools network, so that students on the school network would be able to access the piratebox by entering the box name followed by the schools network (i.e. mypiratebox.school.edu). We realize this goes against the idea of a piratebox being a strictly offline network, but we feel that such a wired system would make our college a more connected place by allowing allowing students to communicate and collaborate in a closed and local environment.

Does anyone know if piratebox supports this kind of functionality, or how we might implement it? Our idea is a little unconventional, so we appreciate anyone who can point us in the right direction and help make this dream a reality.

Edit: Forgot to mention my hardware specs. We built our Piratebox on a Raspberry Pi 3, so it's capable of both wifi and ethernet networking.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/19/2018 01:53AM by TSIDAFOE.

Hi,

If you do not want to bridge/route the lan (school network) and the WiFi (PirateBox network), that will work,

The most important point in any scenario is, that the PirateBox need a static hostname within the campus network. The (damn) droops Upload box is an iFrame which always points to PirateBox.lan:8080 , which can be changed in content/index.html to something else.
The other configurations about the hostname is well documented and possible.

You can also define a static IP address on the lan side of the RPi3 (search for “archlinux netctl static ip”).

Does that help? What else do you need to go forward on your experiment?

Best regards Matthias