dd-wrt

Wed Mar 30 20:05:27 CDT 2011

Hi Mike,
I second the recommendation of an apple airport extreme for a wifi
device. They are very nice.  As for wifi devices to "tinker" with,
it's hard to beat the linksys wrt54gl on the price and availability
front but I've also played around a lot with ubiquiti networks
hardware running both their airos firmware and openwrt and it is a
very nice platform.

I don't have the personal connection with netgate you seem to have but
I have bought several things from them in the past and will say I've
never been disappointed. they are an awesome company to work with.

I also am a fan of monowall and pfsense both, they are awesome open
source products but recently have been building home
gateways/firewall/routers on openbsd and have found it a great
platform for this as well.

Thanks and 73's,
-- 
Josh Smith
KD8HRX
email/jabber:  juicewvu at gmail.com
phone:  304.237.9369(c)

On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 8:57 PM, Mike O'Dell <mo at ccr.org> wrote:
> On the other hand, if you want a Wifi base station That Just Works,
> as opposed to the very valid purpose of goofing on wifi to learn about it,
> the Apple AirPort Extreme is about as sweet as they come. I've had the
> misfortune of using a very large fraction of everything that's been out
> there up until 18 months ago or so - when i got the AirPort Extreme.
>
> for those of you who wish to go a bit more "hand-on" than just flashing
> code,
> check out
>
>    netgate.com
>
> for a whole raft of tasty bits like build-it-yourself routers and wifi
> things,
> and mini-PCI Wifi cards (some of which run high power!), and lots of stuff
> on
> the ocean of software available for this world.  Monowall is a common
> choice,
> and Jim Thompson, one of the netgate folks, is a major contributor to
> pfSense.
> Jim is as knowledgeable about the ins and outs of wifi hardware as anyone i
> know.
> he designed the hardware at at least 3 startups and can give the mother of
> all
> lectures about the ugly foibles of the direct-conversion wifi chips, the
> common
> errors people make doing channel assignments in their wifi nets, etc, etc,
> etc.
> he's a veritable fount of knowledge.  i've been after him to write a book
> but no luck so far.
>
>    -mo
>
>
> On 3/30/11 5:51 PM, Sean Sheedy wrote:
>>
>> +1 on OpenWRT!
>>
>> The wiki at OpenWRT.org has a list of devices on which one of the prebuilt
>> binaries should work without modification.  You might think you need to
>> build your own binary, (and you can if you need to load up with apps and
>> shed as much memory weight as possible) but you probably don't need or even
>> want to (I went down that road and found out it was totally unnecessary.)
>>
>> Once you install the binary, you have access to a package manager.
>>  Through the web interface (or, IIRC, a secure shell), you can download and
>> install precompiled packages and there are a LOT available.  OpenWRT has
>> come a long way in a few short years.  It really has become a mini Linux
>> distro.
>>
>> It does help to have familiarity with the Linux command line if you want
>> to do more off-the-wall stuff.
>>
>> As an example, I hooked a WRT160NL (the next gen of the WRT54GL, which has
>> a USB port) to a Logitech web cam.  From a laptop on the WRT160NL's wifi
>> side, I was able to download some packages and SSH into the box to configure
>> a console app that let the WRT160NL serve the webcam's images via HTTP.
>>
>> I then stuck this in my van (a Dodge Sprinter, which is almost a mini RV
>> and has a house battery bank) and gave it a mobile internet connection via a
>> Sprint EVDO card with a static IP address through a Cradlepoint router which
>> provided an ethernet connection to the WRT160NL's ethernet WAN connection.
>>  I'm sure I could have plugged the EVDO card right into the WRT160NL's USB
>> port using a hub, and set it up to make a PPP connection through serial USB,
>> but I was *really* short on time.  In fact I was headed to California and
>> needed to leave the van at the airport, so I monkeyed with the firewall
>> settings of the WRT160NL so that I could SSH in from the Internet, and
>> prayed that I got it right (when done I had one hour to catch the flight.)
>>
>> Fortunately I did get it right, and from California I was able to complete
>> the firewall changes to enable the web configuration interface, open up a
>> second port for the camera image HTTP server, configure the web cam app to
>> stream images, download a few more packages, and reboot a few times (perhaps
>> not necessary) and not once did I have to manually yank the power (which
>> would have been impossible from 2700 miles away, and I thought for sure was
>> going to be needed and would have ended the party.)  After messing with this
>> during a meeting I was able to show my friend sitting next to me in Santa
>> Clara a view of the inside of the van looking at snow that had piled up on
>> the windshield overnight in Virginia.
>>
>> So here's a big endorsement for OpenWRT.  It's stable, it's not too
>> difficult to figure out, and it is a popular "distro" so you will find help
>> via Google.  A lot of linux packages have been ported so you can find lots
>> of help for those packages individually.  If you spring for a supported
>> device that has a USB port you can hook up all sorts of interesting gadgets.
>>  You can do a lot of different things with the only real price being the
>> need to be familiar with SSH and the linux command line since many of the
>> available packages are command line apps and don't have a web interface.  If
>> you're not already familiar with the linux command line, OpenWRT provides a
>> great opportunity to ease your way into it, hands-on.
>>
>> Sean AI4ID
>>
>> On 03/30/2011 07:17 AM, Josh Smith wrote:
>>>
>>> Alex,
>>> You should also check out open-wrt. It is a similar but more open
>>> source project.
>>>
>>> If you are looking for something more ham centric then you should also
>>> check out the hsmm-mesh project.  It is based on open-wrt but has a
>>> focus on using the devices under part 97 rules to establish a mesh
>>> network.
>>>
>>> 73 de kd8hrx
>>>
>>
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