The Pædantic Programmer

So… I got my Debian router online. I expect to add ipv6 support to my network real soon now.

The permanent storage is a 2G CF card with a CF to IDE adapter. The system has 1G of memory. The quagga bgpd has a full IPv4 table loaded. It looks like it’s eating around 180M to do that. I bet this could be reduced by storing some of those data to an RDBMS. I’ll talk with Paul about it one of these days.

I plan to start the RIP daemon up here shortly, since the new OpenSolaris VM will make use of it. If I can get a static IP on the secondary link, I’ll set up another Quagga server on it and see about doing some load balancing.

The system currently supports VPNs using OpenVPN. I’ve got one set up between the Everett and Seattle locations. The Seattle location is using a WRT54G running OpenWRT. It is a pretty capable box but is not able to handle a full BGP table due to memory constraints (16M).

The router supports the following routing protocols using Quagga:

• RIP
• RIPng
• OSPFv2
• OSPFv3
• BGP

The router supports the OLSR protocol (for wireless mesh routing) using olsrd

The router supports 802.1q VLAN trunking and tagging using vlan.

The router supports 802.1d bridges using bridge-utils

The router supports the following tunnel types using iproute:

• IPv4 in IPv4
• gre
• sit
• isatap
• IPv6 in IPv6
• IPv4 in IPv6

The router supports traffic shaping and traffic control using iproute

The router supports firewalling and network address translation (NAT) using iptables

The router supports monitoring using snmpd, and munin

The router supports intrusion detection and/or prevention using snort

I’m putting together a WISP, I guess.

Here’s the mast in the basement prior to mounting it:

The antenna, not mounted

Here’s the fancy antenna strapped to the chimney:

Antenna

Here’s the rack of computers that will be participating on the network:

The rack

So, I’m attaching a radio to the chimney. I don’t want to have to bring it down every time I need to flash the firmware, so I’m also running an rs-232 cable up to it along with the PoE data/power cable. Since they don’t have anything pre-built, I wired one myself. I also made a png of the schematic I used. It is probably wrong. The rj-45 should probably have been flipped over, ‘cuz as it stands, I need to attach a null-modem converter and a rj-45 to db-9 converter I got from Sun from the last Try & Buy thing I did. It would probably be easier to wire up the rj-45 end as a second db-9 end. I’ll probably do that tonight. But this is the current state, and I’ve confirmed that it works just fine. The cat-5 is about 100′ in length, and I saw no loss of signal. YMMV.

Anyway, that’s the dealio.

I’m putting together the first station for the Everett Wireless Network. To the right is a picture of the radio I will eventually put on our roof. I plan to attach an omni to the pole and drill another couple holes in the box (one for the 802.11g omni, one for the serial console over cat5) and then strap it to the chimney. I’ve currently got a cantenna attached to the B card that Rob gave me years ago. There’s a directional 5.8GHz Backfire attached to the A card that I bought from Metrix Communication. I plan to point this at my other antenna after it is put up on a neighbor’s roof.

I bought a copy of the study guide for the Technician class ham radio license. I hope to learn enough to look less like a noob on #nanog. Or #swn, for that matter. Maybe I’ll learn something that will be useful along the way.

If anyone from Everett is reading this and is interested in joining the network, I’d love to hear from you. I plan to set up a tunnel server for those without line of sight to other members of the network. OpenVPN works well for this purpose, as does GRE tunneling using iproute

I’ve been wandering around Everett today with Scarlet. We went to the County building, the City building and the Everett PD to discuss IT-related things. The main thing that we spoke about was the state of the Everett Wireless Network. I feel that the community should host its own internt service, and I’m trying to share with fellow citizens exactly how we might go about this.

I’ve been speaking with Metrix Communication about getting some hardware, and one of our fellow community wireless networkers about getting an installation and maintenance contract in place. After I learn how to do it and how well it works, I’ll perhaps try to sell my neighbors on it.

The idea is that those who want to communicate with one another place antennae on their roof and point them at the eachother. Of course not everybody can point an antenna at everyone with whom they wish to connect. Traffic may need to be routed through (optionally) trusted third parties to get from point A to point B.

Technology such as TLS can provide a means by which data transported over third parties can be guaranteed secure and verifiable. TLS used to be called SSL.

Each link would be capable of carrying roughly 20MB/s.

I am looking into pricing for radios and antennae. I’ll report here when I find something worth reporting.

C.J. Blathers about recent major changes in his life.

https://colliertech.com/~cjcollier/confidential/sateOfTheCJ20060625.ogg
https://colliertech.com/~cjcollier/confidential/sateOfTheCJ20060625.mp3

Mail me for credentials.

Hey all. Please comment on this entry. I’m trying to get an idea of who’s listening to what I say.

Why do you read this blog? Are you interested in community wireless networks? OpenGL development on Linux? Family? Business Intelligence? Synchronizaton Manager news? Freecycle™ development? Random Perl bits? Something else I’ve forgotten about?

I’m finding myself over-extended and I need to cut back on some of the things I focus on. Please let me know what is important to you so I know how best to re-organize my time, energy and other resources.

For those of you who want to hear me read this instead of having to do so yourself (no hyperlinks), click here for .ogg and here for .mp3.

I migrated the blogs’ database and code from moonunit to avenger, both of which run Debian Sarge. Y’all should now notice a vast improvement in throughput. The ISP that Moonunit sits on should also see a large decrease in traffic.

Today, I added a campaign to raise funds for hosting. If you have any extra funds, please help me with colocation costs. It’s expensive and y’all use up a bunch of bandwidth. If you find this site useful please support it financially.

Today I’m looking into the syncmangui java code and getting my ducks in a row in order to make it *easy* to add bi-directional support for MySQL to the Synchronization Manager.

I took a four-day weekend on Friday-Monday. I spent a bit of time playing with the computer, but most of the time was spent organizing the house and getting some spring cleaning accomplished. Sadly, Hannah got sick and we weren’t quite as productive as we would have liked.

The thing from this weekend I consider most worth mentioning is DBMail. I hopped on the Courier IMAP server mailing list and announced my intention of building a database backend for the server and calling it MailDB. It seems someone already had that idea. It also seems that they have been doing a great job with it. It’s licensed under the GPL, and it’s being run in production. Next weekend, I plan on putting up an instance and migrating away from Maildir. I’ll let you all know how it turns out.

Yesterday, I wandered up Everett Ave to do a site survey at the building on which I’m considering putting an antenna. It’s a pretty nice setup, and provided I can re-sell some of the bandwidth, it’s even affordable. That’s a big if, though :) This will be node 1 (indexed from 0) on the Everett Wireless Network, provided I end up getting the antenna mounted. I’ve got some paperwork to get back to the real estate guy before things are ready to go, though.

I’m returning that T2000 server to Sun. It was nice and performed well. I strongly recommend it to businesses able to lay down the cash. It seems like it will scale well: low power consumption, large amounts of memory, and an adequate set of processors. Peter Z. ran some benchmarks on it and presented them (along with many others) in his talk at the MySQL Users’ Conference this year.

Alright… that’s all I have for now :)

I’m re-organizing my various blogs to this one. WordPress can syndicate categories. So I’m adding a category for each of the blogs I keep. Except for LiveJournal. I’ve got lots of posts there, and there’s no way (as far as I know) to copy all of them to this one. Plus, I like Brad and I don’t mind giving him $25/year for his services.