Switch MESH

[kaplan]

Does anyone have a switch or router I could borrow?

My Linksys E900 has a locked-up WAN port that defies dd-wrt or factory firmware updates and I assume is now scrap.

I'd like to find a cheap WR54G locally if possible. At any rate, no funds for purchase until after March 1st. A 4-port switch would be fine for the interim if a router is unobtanium.

At some point, a few of us in Springfield would like to try out MESH using dd-wrt and Amateur Radio (we can legally use greater RF power levels, external antennae, etc.). The 54G and like are the preferred, though models like the single band E900 and E2000 also work. Since Cohn abandoned us, are there any hams left besides Jim and I? If you are interested in the ham radio-Linux connection or quasi-public MESH networking, let's talk.

Anyhow, if you have a dusty or unused router or switch I can borrow or lightly reimburse you for, please let me know. Does not have to be a 54G if the price is right!

TIA

Kaplan

[Paul Merrell]

On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 10:51 AM, kaplan <kg7fu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Does anyone have a switch or router I could borrow?

Hi, Kaplan,

I've got two gathering dust. Both are Linksys. One is an E1200, the
other a WRT54GS. I'd need to dig for the power supply on the latter.

Better yet, I'm in Springfield and am very interested in participating
in a MESH experiment.

I'll be home all day today if you want to drop by and pick up one of
them. But please let me know in advance if you've got eyes for the
WRT54GS so I can dig out its power supply. I'm across 5th Street from
Fred Meyer, 1914 N. Fifth St. # 11.

Best regards,

Paul

[Hippy Nerd]

I do love those older WRT54Gs, but they are very hard to find now, You
can buy new ubiquity routers that will take DDWRT, or whatever
firmware you like.

Are you doing a WDS mesh? I ran one that had 5 routers, and I found
that when I dropped it down to 3 routers, it worked a lot better. Too
many WDS stations somehow make things slower.

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[Hippy Nerd]

http://www.ubnt.com/

[kaplan]

Thanks Paul!

Can you email me kg7fu...@gmail.com I'm available after 2pm and can hop an emx down more or less your way.

[kaplan]

I'm not sure that WDS is what we're looking at, isn't that dd-wrt specific for the equivalent of range extender or piling up hotspot?

Google "Dallas" "Amateur" and "MESH" together and look at the variety of setups the Dallas, TX area hams are doing. One nifty idea is to have battery powered networking in the field during a disaster when generally only the municipalities and government have power and networking. We can go in and set up field communications complete with LANs and totally supplant the broken utility "service" until the hurricane, flood, or whatever is passed, wires are re-strung, and cell service restored.

I found lots of WR54G's on Amazon in the $20-25 range. They should be plentiful soon with the plethora of "smart" routers, ie NSA livign room snoops :P

[Paul Merrell]

On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 12:33 PM, kaplan <kg7fu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Can you email me kg7fu...@gmail.com I'm available after 2pm and can hop an
> emx down more or less your way.

Done.

[Sam Bentson]

Hey, this is great. I've come to the EUG LUG a few times in the past, but I live in Cottage Grove actually now in Dorena so it is quite a treck. We are making good progress with meshing networking in cottage grove. We are using byzantium (http://project-byzantium.org/). It seems to work well out of the box, although we haven't actually succeeded in making a network where each node can talk to each other. We did a test several times in which one laptop would stay home and the others went out walking. When both of the walkers got out of range, one took a few steps back and the other kept going. We found that even though the middle laptop was in range of the home laptop, the long range laptop could not connect to the home laptop. I think it is a configuration error, but I don't understand why something called a mesh network doesn't do this.

We also had a lot of success with the BATMAN protocol (http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/open-mesh/wiki) although all of the computers we have access to have some problem or another which makes it difficult to use BATMAN. Actually, one or two work, but not three. Still, it has a lot of potential.

There are lots of linksys routers on eBay for $25. I got mine at goodwill for $15, but you have to be careful because not all of them run dd-wrt (and I'm not sure what you can do with dd-wrt).

Sam

[Hippy Nerd]

I havnt gotten any wrts in many years, but models that you could
re-flash were pretty limited. It maybe that there are plenty of
flashable models now.

You can look up models here, and find out details, hardware and
software vary a lot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_WRT54G_series

The WRT runs off 12v, and I've run them off old car batteries for like
a month at a time. I think the board really runs 3.3v, and you could
probably rig them up to run on a few small batteries if you are
clever.

Im pretty sure many firmwares support WDS, I think I've even mixed
firmwares in a WDS setup.

What firmware are the cool kids using these days? openWRT? tomato? DDwrt?

[James S. Kaplan]

I'm using DD-WRT www.dd-wrt.com. The others seem to be vertical in niches. WDS is ok for inside a business I think, but I'm not sure I'd use it around the house. It also requires identical modulation schemes which usually means matched pairs.

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[Sam Bentson]

I agree, WDS requires luck to get the matched pairs.

[Hippy Nerd]

I guess im lucky, i had 5 working nodes... It was pretty easy to
setup, but 3 routers had better performance.

I had trouble using ddwrt 024, but it had some neat features. I ended
up using 023, and it worked pretty good.