[TriLUG] Kevin: Airport Config + Long Haul Wireless

[William W. Ward]

Alchemist,

The Mac Airport can be configured using a Windows applet available from
Apple's website.  I haven't used it myself, so I cannot comment on its
fitness for doing anything in particular, but someone with an available
Windows machine can take care of that for you.

On the subject of getting that last 2000 feet:

I don't think a solar setup would be practical for getting wireless from
your neighbor.  I'll have to go back and look though.  If you have the
up-front monies to invest in a suitably large solar array and storage cell,
you may be in good shape.  Keep in mind that solar cells are horribly
inefficient to begin with, and as the sun's angle changes the power output
drops off sharply.  I don't know what the current drain is on the average
Linksys AP, but the 350mw transmitter coupled to a very short bit of cable
and a low-cost parabolic antenna should traverse 2000 feet both reliably and
with a robust signal.  7 miles have been achieved with a PC-card transmitter
at 100mw with line-of-sight between two parabolic antennas (each is about
$100).  You could probably get away with a couple omnidirectional antennas
on the cheap.  Anything is better than the rubber-duck dummy loads they put
on the transmitters.

I'm interested in traversing a 5.3 mile distance, but I have a treeline to
consider.  The terrain between the two points has a mere 10 foot grade to
consider, and no hills inbetween.  Its low-priority, but the purpose is to
get my dial-up bound buddy connected to my lan, and able to work through my
128K ISDN.

On that subject, I'd definitely be considering how much abuse you want to
take from Time Warner, the same company that believes it's ethical to sell
you "unlimited" bandwidth with so many conditions on it's use.  I'll stick
with ISDN and Intrex.net.  If Intrex gets too snippy about what sort of
traffic I can use (VPN, for example) then I'll just switch to another
provider.

Whats the plan for this newbie affair?  I could use some real instruction on
a few fronts.  Fundamentals like recovering a damaged system, backing up
data, and sorting out hardware issues would be ideal.  For example, I would
like to load Debian on my Thinkpad 701C (I've done this in the past) and
have someone point out what packages I can trim out to save overhead in CPU
and storage.

Just a thought,
Bill

Online's Place BBS, 1990-1995.