[theon144]

The project met the exact same end its predecessor (the PirateBox) did, and for pretty much the same reason. However, the project is quite old, and the focus on reflashing portable routers was a necessity then, but not so anymore - specifically, PirateBox (2011) actually predates the first Raspberry Pi (2012), and especially the first Pi with an onboard Wi-Fi (2016).

I'm just wondering, why hasn't a SBC-based alternative popped up yet? I think the project is/was awesome, I actually did maintain 2 public PirateBoxen for a while. Is it a simple lack of interest? The fact LibraryBox tried to pick up after PirateBox kind of suggests otherwise. I feel like it's actually easier now than ever to build a Libary/PirateBox-like project (although I do imagine an on-board network card probably has way worse performance than even those old portable routers).

I've even tried to put together an image like that in the past but I couldn't find a reproducible solution for creating raspi images so that put me off, maybe it's time to give it another try...

[palmscenter]

The main problem with these projects - which was not much of an issue when the projects started - is that mobile phones of today seek access to web servers at vendors, including the OS source and possibly others such as the phone manufacturer and ISP. The phones balk if they don't connect to those servers. PirateBox and LibraryBox are not just captive portals to Internet connections, they are local content and app servers and don't need the Internet.

So when you connect to a Box via Wi-Fi your phone demands to connect to Internet hosts even though this is unnecessary for this use case. This behavior is confusing to the user. Some early solutions involved trying to spoof Apple servers for example, but the names and IPs of these servers kept changing and this kluge became ineffective.

The only solution I am aware of is to pre-inform users of a local IP address to browse to once their Wi-Fi is connected to the Box. But depending on the occasion and venue, getting such instructions to the audience and having them follow it, can be its own problem.

[butterbox]

You can setup DNS on the box to redirect users and to give a friendly name to your box. That's what we do for butter box (https://likebutter.app/box/). To make it a step easier, we provide a QR code. But even that is a little clumsy since you must first connect to WiFi, then scan the code.

Captive portals sound nice until you find out how limited they are -- a lot of styling, JS and browser features are simply unavailable. So, you need to tell users "Close this, then go open this site in your real browser"...

Of course, you can't and probably don't want to redirect HTTPS traffic since you don't have the matching cert for e.g. https://google.com

[ramses0]

SSID: LibraryBox@http-10.20.30.40

I actually have a "MonsterOTG" portable WAP. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THnT-rWFnE8 ...their pitch was "put your kids movies on an SD card and they can navigate to them from their iPad (on a road-trip)"... or have all the media on one SD-card and not have to have them on all your phones (like a proto-NAS, kindof).

I used it actually while on a trip to "fake" being a web-server. eg: `scp index.html 10.1.10.1:/media/files/public` (or whatever) and then I could have my phone navigate to it. Chromebook => "OTG-Wifi" && Phone => "OTG-Wifi". Chrombook.push(); Phone.fetch(...);

I couldn't connect directly from phone to chromebook, but if they were both on the same (captive) wifi, I could actually have the phone navigate to the server running on the chromebook via that little device as a "wifi mediator" (even while in the middle of nowhere with no internet for 50 miles around). I had some episodes of Twilight Zone that I'd ripped and could connect to it while on a flight. You could take the SD-Card out of your camera and fetch pictures over to the macbook-without-sd-card situation, then clear the card and take more pics (or keep them on and just be guaranteed that you have a backup).

There's really some non-pirate use cases of things like that, and the overall concept is pretty cool! Got me thinking of something like a neighborhood "Captive SSID", like a LAN that you opt in to vs the WAN that's always connected. It's really instructive to think through for yourself personally: if you were on the moon, and all you had was a wifi access point that held SD-Cards

[wolverine876]

> when you connect to a Box via Wi-Fi your phone demands to connect to Internet hosts

I don't follow: When my phone connects to a wlan, it will try to connect to the Internet, and if the phone can't do that then the phone won't function on the wlan?

> The only solution I am aware of is to pre-inform users of a local IP address to browse to once their Wi-Fi is connected to the Box.

What is the response from this local IP address that solves the problem above?

[indrora]

> I'm just wondering, why hasn't a SBC-based alternative popped up yet?

I actually did that as a part of Google Summer of Code: https://github.com/LibraryBox-Dev/alexandria

The goal was to make LibraryBox, but with just a little more frontend and a little more flexibility. It had a lot of the earliest things: Simple wifi support, and was built to enable you to add services like Gopher, maybe Gemini, IRC, etc.

In the end, there was not quite enough interest. Jason moved up in the ranks of the then Berkman Kline center, 2018 became a very touchy time for things.

You can easily run Alexandria, which at its core is a very basic directory browser, the admin panel can be turned off. I wanted to add the ability to upload & expand archives of files, but couldn't find a good way to do that at the time.

[butterbox]

Butter Box (https://likebutter.app/box/) and Internet In a Box are two modern descendants of the concept. Both run on RPis (and, nominally, some other hardware).

Putting together the images isn't terribly difficult. For Butter Box, we just run a script to install all the things we want, then make an .iso of that, which we distribute on our site and in hardware form.

Those onboard network cards are indeed a problem. You can get single-digit # of simultaneous users. But other than that, they tend to be very fast for large files since you're not going out over the Internet and can saturate the WiFi connection.

[duxup]

It probably is easier than ever, but if I think about doing it, who is going to randomly connect to my device and download files?

And who ... "should" want to with all the security considerations and etc?

Still it would be a very cool hobby project none the less.

[griffey]

Thanks for situating this in history! It's easy for people to look at the project and be like "why no RPi?" without understanding that when LibraryBox started, Raspberry Pi's didn't have onboard wifi, and the travel routers we chose to support were SIGNIFICANTLY less expensive as well. We're in a very different hardware world now.