Adding to the many things that I have done because hashtag #TheFediMadeMeDoIt I went and turned my 2021 Raspberry Pi Model B into a PirateBox.
Using the Raspberry Pi version from the Piratebox website that closed in 2019 I was surprised to find that the old Model B could perform with some power when not weighed down by the bloat of a 2024 operating system. The installation went exactly as described in the "How Tos" and the startup times weren't too bad.
I followed all the steps and launched the forums as well as the chat and file sharing functionality, although if I had been planning on running a device like this in the wild I would probably skip the forum step out of an abundance of caution. The chat is wiped on restart, but the forums persist as well as the files!
After completing the connected setup and doing a test boot I decided to give it a spin in a simulated setup. I removed the screen and keyboard, and plugged it in to a small USB battery pack. After a couple of minutes the WiFi SSID was visible, and I discovered the big problem that had close dthe project all those years earlier.
Yep, I'd missed the small print that explained this was all running in HTTP. It was obvious as soon as I thought about it, but it meant that my stock FIrefox with average security settings just refused to open the captive portal page and as there was no network beyond it it considered the WiFi connection dead on arrival.
Interestingly my Android phone opened the captive portal happily, but blocked the banner at the top by displaying a "No internet detected, keep using this network?" prompt. Clicking to stop using the connection stopped everything as expected, but bizarrely clicking "Use anyway" also caused the HTTP connection to be closed and the browser to consider the network dead.
Chrome on the Android phone also refused to play ball. However, the Android version of Firefox, with the same stock settings as the Browser version I was running on Linux worked just fine.
After a bit of playing I dsicovered LibreWolf would run the HTTP connection without questions straight out the box on my laptop, and so spent a few happy minutes sharing chat and files between my phone and laptop via the Pi.
After a couple of hours of fun I looked at it all and decided that although it was a fun and simple puzzle to put together, the HTTP issue rendered it useless now the world is so used to HTTPS. Obviously this is a good thing in terms of security, but does mean that my Raspberry Pi is once again without a purpose.
I did look at more modern iterations of the same idea, such as Shareboxx but the minimum spec requirements are now for a Raspberry Pi 4 ideally a Pi5, and it won't even consider running on my old Model B.
Ah well, not a bad way to spend an evening.
=> PirateBox.cc the official website closed in November 2019 This content has been proxied by September (ba2dc).
=> SHareboxx the modern take on PirateBox but with minimum spec requirements to matchProxy Information
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