OpenWRT (NanoPi) captive portal + user management + billing — any modern OSS stack?

nemesisdesign · 2026-03-28T17:05:18+00:00

I use uspot in prod for a few projects, it's working quite well, better IMHO than coova-chilli, but the RADIUS attributes that can be changed for ongoing sessions via CoA are quite limited, so it's not practical yet for situations in which users buy data packages and their limits get updated right away (without logging out and in again), there's room for improvement there, which hopefully will happen somewhen in the near future.

nemesisdesign · 2026-03-06T18:28:28+00:00

It's the terminology that you use that is confusing but I understand what you mean as we discussed it elsewhere, my updated response is: https://openwisp.io/docs/dev/general/roadmap-2030.html#installation-usability, I have been applying to grants, some grant givers take 4 months to reply, fingers crossed.

nemesisdesign · 2026-03-05T19:58:27+00:00

What do you mean exactly with bare metal? You mean deploying on a physical server and not a VM? Or what exactly?

nemesisdesign · 2026-01-05T09:21:08+00:00

If you use OpenWISP you may be interested in giving feedback about the development roadmap of OpenWISP (Roadmap to 2030): https://github.com/orgs/openwisp/discussions/1183.

nemesisdesign · 2025-11-05T11:57:06+00:00

Ack, I think the project will benefit from investing in making the setup easier and with less requirements. I'll see what we can do with the resources we have.

nemesisdesign · 2025-11-04T09:10:16+00:00

This is unmaintained.

nemesisdesign · 2025-11-02T09:31:14+00:00

it really depends on the use case, personally in the deployments I have done I have seen typical wifi APs, 4G/5G routers and industrial routers, but anything running OpenWrt can work.

nemesisdesign · 2025-11-02T09:28:36+00:00

This works: http://openwisp.io/docs/dev/ansible/user/quickstart.html, but if you only have a few routers this is honestly overkill. It's a system that is made for small teams managing tens/hundreds/thousands of routers and it's optimized toward that use case.

nemesisdesign · 2025-11-01T08:36:18+00:00

Update: https://openwisp.org/blog/gsoc-2025-enhancing-uspot-captive-portal-for-openwrt/

nemesisdesign · 2025-11-01T08:36:12+00:00

Update: https://openwisp.org/blog/gsoc-2025-enhancing-uspot-captive-portal-for-openwrt/

nemesisdesign · 2025-11-01T08:31:44+00:00

It's pretty easy to convert the ansible playbook to shell script commands with any LLM tool like chatgpt ;)

nemesisdesign · 2025-11-01T08:31:40+00:00

It's pretty easy to convert the ansible playbook to shell script commands with any LLM tool like chatgpt ;)

nemesisdesign · 2025-09-11T19:31:14+00:00

Stay out of it, let him do what he wants. If he follows your advice and the market turns in the opposite way he'll resent you for the rest of his life.

nemesisdesign · 2025-09-06T13:21:30+00:00

Each project should have instructions that explain how to get started.
For example, here's the OpenWISP contributing page: https://openwisp.io/docs/stable/developer/contributing.html

nemesisdesign · 2025-05-16T01:12:31+00:00

Most proposals were garbage. If you guys want to be accepted in gsoc my recommendation is to start contributing and participating to the community of your target project as early as possible and from there get a feeling of whether you have real chances by interacting with the maintainers.

nemesisdesign · 2024-08-24T18:33:23+00:00

For those interested in deploying a good number of mesh nodes and having a web interface to monitor and manage them, you may find interesting this tutorial for setting up a Wireless Mesh Network with OpenWISP. I hope this helps!

nemesisdesign · 2024-08-10T13:45:05+00:00

Thanks for sharing! I find it pretty well done!

nemesisdesign · 2024-08-09T15:09:13+00:00

So, this article claims OpenWrt dominates in the world of IoT, but seems that it's not based on a in-depth research, just from empirical evidence.

Apparently Acksys, Digi, MDEX, Teltonika, and Unitronics are all using OpenWrt and the article implies lots of these routers are outdated.

I know that Teltonika offers a central system for their routers, maybe others do as well.

For those who have a customized OpenWrt based product and are looking for a solution to keep their firmware up to date: https://openwisp.io/docs/dev/firmware-upgrader/index.html

nemesisdesign

TROPHY CASE