[MLB-WIRELESS] Node BCA now suffering 100% packet loss

[Barry Park]

Ey all,

Node BCA is now officially offline. There's pix and a short postmortem of
how all the equipment/network has fared over the last six months at
http://wireless.bur.st. Everything appears to have survived quite well
despite some signs of water impregnation.

Thanks to Rob B and vak, who were pretty much responsible for getting the
node on air and off, as well as Craig Sanders for a huge support
effort configuring some bastard hardware to pass packets wirelessly
without complaint.

The network at this end consisted of a Dlink DWL900AP+ connected to a
Debian box providing nat and masquerading to a transparent squid proxy
server. It was connected via 10m of LMR 400 to a modded 19dBi ex-Galaxy antenna (using a
julesf modded mount) to node BHH over a 1.7km distance. The link in the
main was stable and easily served data at 500kbps with a ~3ms ping. Nodes
connecting via BHH saw the data rates drop a fair bit more if the squid
logs are anything to go by (nevyn, you were getting 25kbps?).

Sadly I don't think we ever used the link for applications that were
a productive use of the bandwidth. Vak and I trialled a few voip
applications without really settling on any one that was well suited for
high-bandwidth applications. We also trialled a bit of videoconferencing
that was moderately successful. In the end, it was ironic that we used
online icq servers for the majority of comms despite local wireless
services that would have easily replaced the online ones. I think that was
more a mindset than anything else.

Node BCA was very slow to get off the ground, and pretty much stalled
until I called in outside help. I'd encourage anyone else who is serious
about getting a node live to see it as a communal effort rather than an
individual task.

So ffs stop arguing about how to cook snags, DNS and routing and just get
your nodes up.  :)

- Barry

--
barry park
http://wireless.bur.st
http://members.optushome.com.au/barrypark

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