How can I redirect to an internal webpage?

Question

Hi there,

I'm quite technical, but my head is spinning looking for an answer to this issue, basically what I want to do is as follows:

Quite simply I work in a store and I'm the most computer literate, so my boss wants me to try and setup a wireless network that our customers can connect to with their phones and it takes them to a webpage with special offers on it.

I've been looking into it for the last couple of days but to be honest it's all a little overwhelming, so I'm wondering if anyone can explain it in more simple and straight-forward terms and this seems like a good place to start.

I've got a wireless modem-router and I've had a look on it and it seems that you can block all incoming connections and redirect them to a LAN server, which I think is what I'd need to do. Looking around on the internet, it seems most people are telling me I need to use apache, but that in itself is completely overwhelming too - and I've also had a fiddle with WAMP and have also been completely baffled.

So basically I'm thinking I need to put a website on a local computer, then somehow get my wireless router to redirect all incoming traffic to that webpage - so if anyone can help me, I'd be massively grateful.

Thank you in advance!!!
Paul.

Answer 1

What you're looking for is a captive portal which is fancy talk for http redirect. Typically it's used for authentication like at a hotel or airport or something. It makes it easy to connect with wifi but then you have to authenticate to a web page or at least acknowledge their terms and conditions.



In your case the user would just connect to your page and do whatever they're supposed to do from there. Anywho, your router should have this as an option because that's really the only way to do it. Look for either a captive portal or http redirect option (perhaps in the security section?) and simply point it to your server.



I agree with the other answer in that if you don't want the customer to access the internet, just your page, then you don't need the modem (built-in or otherwise). I also agree that it's unlikely people will go through this much effort and a kiosk might be a better idea.

Answer 2

Your modem/router is just that - you don't want to give customers access to the wireless on that since they will get access to the internet via the modem side ...



All you want is a wireless router (a modem/router without the modem side connected would be ok), and connect to your web server using that.



However , it still means that when your customers come in to the shop they will need to specifically connect to the wireless there (which will be OPEN) , but there are other OPEN wireless services like BTFON and BTOpenzone , so they still have to 'do some work' to do this...



Seems to me all you really want to do is present them with something shoing all the offers , so just bung a PC with a screen in a prominent place which shows the offers , and there are lots of simple ways to do this - rolling 'powerpoint-type' presentations , web pages etc etc etc.



Apache is just a web server - very simple to set up.

Answer 3

Yes But With the help of hardware Eng.