SputnikNet Updates - January 12, 2012

Here are numerous improvements that we’ve rolled out to SpuntikNet recently. The newest updates took place on January 12-13, 2012; those are bolded. The rest were introduced since the last changelog entry.

Please note that we no longer will be identifying SputnikNet with a version number, but instead, by date. (Sputnik Agent firmware will continue to use a version number—currently that is 3.4.0.)

Captive Portals

• Content management system added to facilitate management of images, CSS, Javascript and text snippets that can be inserted into portals as tags
• Improved portal design subsystem
• Thumbnail previews added to captive portal list and associated router pages
• Added optional pre-login portal to improve performance of hotspots with lots of ambient connections
• Added the ability to duplicate portals
• Suppressed autocapitalization in portal fields when displayed on iOS devices

Authentication Systems

• Device authentication: enabled MAC-authenticated device sessions to survive idle timeout and DHCP lease expiration, sustaining connections indefinitely
• PayPal authentication: added new IPs that PayPal is using for their services to the default walled garden rules
• User authentication: user search enhanced to include login ID, display name and email address, with optional wild-card searching
• Block private networks policies are now applied to all new authentication systems by default, for enhanced security

Network/Device Management

• Added a site survey command that will return detailed information about a router’s radio environment, enabling rogue AP detection
• Added alternate port and verbose mode options to OpenDNS content filtering
• Enabled router list to display hardware, chipset, clock frequency, RAM, flash memory
• Added DNS resolution to pre-validate walled garden rules
• Added support for tagging a router’s location with latitude/longitude
• Added automatic cleanup of authentication system and network policy overrides when converting a node from standard or pro to NMS mode

System

• Improved timezone handling
• Integrated documentation search and live tech support chat on all SputnikNet pages
• Added multi-threading to handle large, busy networks