WAN Ideas

yellum

I'll try and get an email list set up tomorrow for the Cork people. I'll also put up some text on http://cork.irishwan.org that the readers here can copy into an email and send to anyone they know that may be interested. Even the non Cork based people reading this and know people in Cork should let them know whats happening.

Update: A page is up now on url]http://cork.irishwan.org[/url] .
Fill in the form if you are interested.

Further Update: Emailed Open and CLUG mailing lists.

Damien.

jaarius

Originally posted by zenith
Hi,
CLUG and/or ILUG should also be contacted, as they've been casting about for this for a while. If memory serves, they seem to be on the west of the city, so interesting possibilities there.

Also, Press/PR is vital for this - there's a lot of hard-core techies of the older generation in Cork who might be interested in this (specially the EMC, Apple lads), and this could really snowball. Can we form a comittee ASAP?

best,
ruairi

i might know a couple of lads in apple who would be interested. afaik they're hardcore. will try and get in contact.


j

pencil

Originally posted by SkepticOne
So who of the Dublin people is up for a daytime meeting the weekend after next (29/30 September) in somewhere in the center of town? Be good to have about five or six people.

Yep, you can count me in.

I also live in Dublin inner city centre - off Dorest St, D7.

I don't have any knowledge about WAN but am more than willing to help out with the website side of things.

I.

www.neonsoup.com

The Cigarette Smoking Man

I'm out in Sutton, which is probably too far away for the moment, but I'd be willing to help out with any of the technical stuff (WAN, routing etc)

Baud

bkehoe:

I wouldn't recommend using the aiport airport base station. It only has a connector for an external aerial if you rip the thing to pieces (taking the warranty with it), and they have a nasty propensity to overheat and die (necessitating the warranty). Seemingly Apple are even replacing them out of warranty, because they know there's a problem.

BTW, have you actually run a link over 30KM, or are you guessing? I know the aiport base station I have has trouble doing 10 metres through the ceiling to go to the roof, let alone the amount they claim it'll do.

L.

bkehoe

Well, the apple airport is in use in lots of other wans as the main access points, and it's going to be used in the first orbiting wireless web server this winter. Any pictures of an airport that I've seen show an external antenna connector into which you plug the pigtail adapter. Anyway, even if the versions of the airport we get do need modding, then it's no problem for me anyway, as I doubt apple give a warranty if it's been out on a mountain powered from a battery and solar panel.

30KM is a guess based on past tests I've done up to 20KM, and from reports from other people, some in the US. 20KM was no problem for my stuff with lower output lucent cards and 2 directional antennas, getting a full signal, so 30KM should be easy for a card with a higher output, possibly running slightly slower; 5.5 or 2MBit. O'Rielly in the US simulated over 30KM with 2 lucent cards with directional antennas and got a full signal.

Brendan.

Doctúir

Originally posted by bkehoe

Also, I've just ordered 4 of the galaxy tv antennas from australia. They're AUS$15 each, and its costing AUS$75 to ship them here.

Can you please post the URL for these?

TIA.

rymus

yellum : had a chat with that friend of mine that I thought would be interested in this. He was. I need that proposal you were working on cos he wants to talk it over with a few of 'his people'. I expressed to him the need for the ISP to offer prices as low as possible while retaining decent access packages. If you still want to do it this way the whole thing would be setup as a commercial ISP and not a credit union of the internet world type of thing. We also talked about a nationwide rollout as quickly as possible (obviously focusing on the main counties first). He seemed quite interested and wanted to get some facts & figures asap, so if u have that document ready, lash it on over to me at rymus@eircom.net

Ohh and P.S. if you can, include a rough estimate of how much it would cost to provide coverage of cork city and practically all of the south cork city area (Carrigaline, Crosshaven, Cobh, etc..) I'm in carrigaline and I dont want to be left in the dark just cos I'm in a valley lol

bkehoe

Doctúir, I'm getting them from a friend who got them from a local dealer. The main supplier that has thousands of em, but doesn't ship internationally; Bitek is the company name.

Hold on a sec; commercial???? Any costs in a community one would just be for the bandwidth; there would be no profit, and users would help fund the installation of access points, e.t.c., as said earlier. Is Cork not going to be a community WAN any more??

Brendan

NeoSlicerZ

yay...what about Galway?

yellum

Originally posted by bkehoe
Is Cork not going to be a community WAN any more??

Its going to be Community only. Not commerical. I will talk to Rymus offlist about this. Meanwhile:

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=86

rymus

perhaps I should have made myself clearer when I said the dreaded word 'commercial'. I didnt want to frighten anyone What I meant is that there will be a body 'company' assigned to deal with the running of the network on a day to day basis. These arent going to be people that want to be paid £600+ a week to do this. It would be people involved personally in the project and doing it for the 'love' of it basically.

Im of the opinion that if this thing wasnt setup like a 'real' ISP it wouldnt gain any real momentum in the long run. I'm aware that profit margins will be very low and indeed the only money that will be made from the service will in all likelyhood be ploughed back into network upgrades/installations etc. There would have to be some kind of hierarchy involved, otherwise no companies/professionals like Esat or this guy I know would touch us with a barge pole. The more professional and organised the better. All ISP's have departments, this should be no different. I'll end the mindless waffle now cos I've got to go to work.

Yellum; We'll have to speak about this in great detail and hammer out a solid plan to get it off the ground. The sooner the better as far as Im concerned. Getting a trial going quickly is a top priority. talk to y'all later

yellum

Lets move the chat about commercial and community run wans there. Its not listed under the dhtml menus just yet but click here
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/foru...p?s=&forumid=86

Damien.

bkehoe

http://www.irishwan.org/board/ has been set up for discussion on all sorts of WAN in Ireland. There are seperate forums for each community, and general forums for discussion, support, and for plans. Still gotta change colours, and get the logo sorted.

zenith

Of course Cork is going to be a community WAN, and if rymus's capitalist running dog mate wants someone to write a business plan for him, he can employ someone to do it.

There's no such thing as smart money: money has to buy smarts, and smart people make money pay.

But enough politics: waiting around for commercial entities to supply the solutions is not a good idea. This WAN should fly on its own, even if there are other solutions available - the point being, we're doing it for fun, because we can, and because it just might work. It's not all about economics, but the fact that it's likely to save us all cash is a good start. Even if it only delivers 64k always on to everybody's house for, say, £400 setup and £200per , is that not good value? If schools get it for a pittance, is that not a good thing?

zenith

MOD,

Can we close this thread and move it to the new forums? It's getting quite unwieldy, and starting to lose focus.

SkepticOne

A number of Dublin people said they might be interested in meeting up informally. I have posted a thread on the IrishWan site here to get an of who's interested and to arrange a time and place.

jgmcbride

One big problem that I see that has not been addressed yet and
is not technical.

How do you regulate people's behaviour.

I am a hog and I want it all and I want it free.

I find out about a local wireless Lan project being up and running
and I live near a site. Assuming that there is a simple registration
process that I can defeat or there is none then I hop on free.

Now that I am on (or have paid my iniitial fee) I start hogging the
connection. I set up a home network and start downloading MP3
files to several computers. All of a sudden our shared bandwidth
is reduced for everyone. I don't really care since I have most of the process automated (resume on broken connection etc.).

There needs to be some sort of a limit placed on access/download. This is something that needs to be thought of
beforehand and not afterward.

I am currently on a shared cable modem environment with new
equipment switches, routers, fibre connections everywhere. Most of the time the system screams. However I do notice the peak usage times that correlate to peoples leisure time. It doesn't stop me browsing or even downloading. I just don't schedule large
downloads for these times.

Within the next few months I will probably install wireless Ethernet in my fixed wire home network just for experimentation purposes.

For those interested in further reading on antenna gain/broadcasting I have seen and read several good articles about the feasability/implementation of such devices. Search the Web for futher info. One series of articles detailing his experiences in WAN networking was written by Robert Cringley.

Hope that some of the above provides some food for thought.

Incidentally I am a transplanted Irishman living in the US. Knowing that all computer equipment is much cheaper here I would be willing to do a certain amount of research regarding prices/availability here if there is interest. From preliminary checking that I have done I anticipate spending less than $200.00 for two cards and my base station.

Urban Weigl

jgmcbride, the WAN could adopt a policy of warning people who are abusing the available bandwidth, and disconnecting them if they do not stop. Moreover, a lot of applications like accessing an internal bulletin board and playing games on the network will not use any Internet bandwidth at all.

IMHO another good idea would be to provide an internal file server on the WAN using Hotline. This would provide a multi-threaded discussion forum, news, chat and file sharing all in one. It also works on both Wintel and Mac computers, with 3rd party Linux clients and servers also available.

cmkrnl

Originally posted by jgmcbride
One big problem that I see that has not been addressed yet and
is not technical.

How do you regulate people's behaviour.

I am a hog and I want it all and I want it free.
.

Thats easy, There are a number of options around to packet shape traffic to stop a single user hogging all the bandwidth. Digging out some dusty bookmarks I find.

http://www.ds9a.nl/2.4Routing/

http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2000/08/24/LinuxAdmin.html

for a start, there are other options out there.

Especially if one uses something like WCCP to seamlessly cache all outgoing browser/ftp traffic. Its very easy then to packet shape connections going to/from the proxy server.


greg

bkehoe

Lucent access points have the ability to limit the speed for each user I beleive, so if a user was hogging bandwidth and slowing down others, he/she could be limited to say 512kbit, or 256kbit till they agree to stop.

cmkrnl

Originally posted by bkehoe
Lucent access points have the ability to limit the speed for each user I beleive, so if a user was hogging bandwidth and slowing down others, he/she could be limited to say 512kbit, or 256kbit till they agree to stop.

Depends on how clever their shaping is, Obviously you want a user to get bandwidth in proportion to how many others are online at the some time, combined with some some time based queueing system that would lower the priority of large downloads, keeping interactive browsing type tasks maximally responsive for everyone else.


greg

bkehoe

Yep. But remember the speed limits would be for everything on the network, not just the net. I beleive that everyone should not be capped on the access points, but just there be some kind of cap on the net connection). So the primary internet access gateway for a community should run some form of linux, squid to keep caching, and traffic shaping, possibly QoS. MRTG should also be set up, so the performance could be monitored on both the gateway and the access point in general.

cmkrnl

Originally posted by bkehoe
MRTG should also be set up, so the performance could be monitored on both the gateway and the access point in general.

I prefer Cricket

http://cricket.sourceforge.net/

One can do all kinds of useful graphing with just about any time series data, last use I made of it, graphed out the amount of entries in the FW-1 connections table, most handy at the time and very easy to setup.


greg

rymus

Originally posted by zenith
and if rymus's capitalist running dog mate wants someone to write a business plan for him, he can employ someone to do it.

That had better not be a dig against me u bollicks Im only tryin to feckin help after all

zenith

re: capitalist running dog comment - I was only slagging. Sorry! I know you're helping.

The Cigarette Smoking Man

I was thinking about the idea of a scalable WAN for Dublin and I think we should create a backbone network and divide it up into different subnets. If we use this model we'll get the most coverage and we'll also get the most bandwidth. The more bandwidth everyone gets the more likely they'll use it rather than DSL etc.

We should also have an ftp server and DNS servers. Another good idea (long term) would be to slap an aerial up on the roof of the building that runs the INEX and we could get a direct connection into all of the Irish ISPs.

I might have a good spot for one of the backbone nodes and some bandwidth too

PS: I like the idea of putting a node in Howth.

bkehoe

Re Backbones;
The main IrishWAN.org communities will be linked by 11MBit backbones. This can be increased to 22MBit if needed by using 2 antennas and cards; vertical and horizontal polarity. What happens in each community is up to the person/people organising it. For example, I only have a say in what happens in Wexford, and possibly Waterford, and can only offer advice to the other communities if needed (which can also be got on the irishwan forums). All each community needs to do is follow the IP assignments, which will be discussed among the leaders of each community.

Servers will be set up for caching, traffic shaping, e.t.c. in each community, as well as to hold useful utilities for network stuff, and any security patches, e.t.c. After that, users can share files with each other, e.t.c.

The Cigarette Smoking Man

Are we going to use RIPE assigned IP addresses or private address ranges? If you use a public IP address range for an area like Dublin with multiple subnets, you'd need a good few addresses. I'm not sure about RIPE, but in the US you have to pay for IP addresses.

I think a centralised ftp server would be a good idea, you can't beat 10Mbps downloads

bkehoe

Private IPs, like most other WANS.