[MLB-WIRELESS] Fitzroy Tower update

[Jonathan Oxer]

> >The tower is very high (15m+) - a 15m pigtail from aerial down to roof would
> >be very expensive and very lossy.

> If you stick with an AP, 
> you're going to run into routing problems when the network gets larger, 
> and that pesky thing about AP's not being able to speak to other AP's. 
> If you run a linux box on the roof, and set everything IBSS (adhoc) you 
> can customise the routing to your liking, and upgrade drivers/firmware 
> much easier as they come out.

One of the potential AP's mentioned in Michael's PDF is a Linksys WAP11
(which I'm running on my node at the moment) which does not do *any*
routing / DHCP at all, it relies entirely on other machines on the
network to handle it. As far as I'm concerned, that's a bonus: let a
Linux box do all the hard work, and let the AP handle just the RF
portion of the job. That way you can do any routing you like through it,
and the WAP11's can now be cranked up to 100mW with a software hack:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/12/31/1340247&mode=thread

For what it's worth, I'd go WAP11 on the tower with Cat5 (for
convenience of cabling as much as signal loss, I find it a lot easier to
work with UTP than Co-Ax) down to a Linux based router (for maximum
routing flexibility, not relying on an AP to do it for you).

Just my opinion.

Regards,

Jonathan Oxer
Internet Vision Technologies


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