[olug] 802.11 wireless - lets firm it up

[Neal Rauhauser]

   I've been thinking quite a bit about how to do this and I am familiar
with what one can do with microwave over long distances. My record thus
far is 22 miles with 5.8 gig :-) I haven't done much with 2.4 gig beyond
5 - 6 miles but its not difficult to go further - I guess this will be
covered in more detail at the next OLUG meeting though ...

   I agree with Brian re: this thing can't be a big fat bridge network
or it'll cave in within hours of any real traffic going on it. It needs
to have multiple subnets and the logical places to break at layer three
are the point to point hops and the central nodes. This means anyone
wishing to forward traffic is going to need to run two APs at their
location and whoever volunteers to be a central site is going to have a
handful - multiple 802.11 segments at one location and a router port for
each link must be available.

   I have the run of 1603 Farnam street - 1340' elevation with lots of
different views. I am going to install at least one bridge (ie a device
that will let APs talk to it rather than just client radios) and I'll
provide a 'backbone' link for any site that can see me.

  As far as organization Chris and I have discussed it a little and this
is what we came up with - there are two classes of systems that connect:

consumers - just a client radio, likely a mobile user, provides no
resources

provider - a site that provides AP/bridge colocation, connectivity to
the internet via proxy, PPPoE, NAT, routed addresses, etc

  Our thoughts were that there would be a Usenet/IETF style engineering
team and that this group would likely be made up mostly of providers who
have a stake in the network's operation.

  I'll go on record right now regarding routed IP - this is a *bad*
*bad* *bad* thing to provide in this sort of setting - given the number
of netstumblers already active in Omaha it will be about 38 minutes from
activation to shutdown due to abuse. Exit from this network should be
via password controlled proxy, PPPoE, or some other method that allows
the site providing transit from the 802.11 cloud to the internet to
identify the source. I suspect the providers would pretty quickly
develop an acceptable use policy ...


   Anyway, trying to do this will be impenetrable via email - we'll save
it for the next olug meeting.










Chris Garrity wrote:
> 
>     The routing aspect of is the part I'm trying to understand (and the
> array of possible hardware configurations). It's been suggested to me
> that the hardware should do spanning tree, which is or is not included
> within how ospf works? I found that hardware configurations range from
> between $100 (do-it-yourself) to $700.
> 
>     Issue number one is cost, it's "Free Like Speech Not Beer". The
> second is security; from proxy web surfing to full-ip services. The
> third is routing. And lastly there's uplink, does one node on the
> network provide connectivity to the Big-I, or is it shared amongst
> nodes, if so how?
> 
>     But these don't have to be worked out all at once, like the Big-I
> back from it was the Big-I --- first there's one node.
> 
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-- 
Neal Rauhauser CCNP, CCDP			phone: 402-951-6390
http://AmericanRelay.com			fax  : 402-951-6390
mailto:nealr at americanrelay.com			fcc  : k0bsd

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For help contact olug-help at bstc.net - run by ezmlm
to unsubscribe, send mail to olug-unsubscribe at bstc.net
or `mail olug-unsubscribe at bstc.net < /dev/null`
(c)2001 OLUG http://www.olug.org

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