Wireless

Finally, there is a non-profit wireless user group - HKWUN encouraging and promoting wireless community network in Hong Kong.

In US, Wireless Community Network has already been success and becoming more popular in the past two years. There are some successful communities to name: Seattle Wireless, NYCWireless, PersonalTelco (Portland) and Socal Free Net (San Diego, S. CA and Orange County).

My production wireless home network already upgraded to WPA. Since 802.11b technology in my Airport card is getting old and will soon be replaced by 11g devices this year, I am not believe that Apple will release update of 11b Airport card to WPA, but they do! Last week, Apple released Airport Software 3.3 update for both Airport (802.11b) and Airport Extreme (802.11g) that enabled WPA supports.

My wireless router is Linksys WRT54g, which is a hot product for hackers. I used WEP, SSID hiding and MAC filtering to secure wireless network. The hardware version is 1.x and the firmware version was still 1.30.7. There is a new 2.00.8 firmwire, but is for new hardware version 2.0. However, this hacked firmware site mentioned that it is required to reset it to factory defaults. So I give it a try. Together with Airport Software update, I decided to upgrade both router firmware and client software. The firmware upgrade process is smooth, without any error. After the upgrade, everything worked fine, wireless and wired network were connected and reachable to each other, but the broadband PPPoE connection was lost and broken. I then followed the manual instruction to reset the router by pressing the reset button over 5 seconds. After a couple of seconds, it automatically reboots. This time the broadband connection were established successfully. But the downside is all configurations were lost and it was reset to factory defaults. I needed to configure the router again.

I ordered two AMD SC520-powered net4501 and net4521 embedded board from
Soekris in May. I have evaluated and tested various embedded OS distributions on these two boards. Lastly, I finally sort out two nice distros: pebble and m0n0wall.

Pebble is a trimmed-down version of Debian, in additon with some custom packages (e.g. 2.4.22 kernel, hostap driver, NoCatAuth, etc. ). It has everything you need for a wireless router and auth gateway. I like pebble mainly because it is based on Debian. When I need more packages, I can just run apt-get. Configuration of pebble is just like other Debian or Linux systems, by modifying files in /etc. However, the size of pebble is quite large when comparing to other serious embedded distros such as LEAF. It is because huge perl packages are required for NoCatAuth. Pebble could be nicely fitted in 64MB Compact Flash card. If you need to run apt-get to some packages, you will need at least 128MB. But it is ok for now, as it is quite hard to find 64MB CF in the market.

Since I bought a Linksys WRT54g router and setup a wireless network at home, I started actively investigating every topics in wireless networking. After google'd a while, not only I gathered some useful information about building wireless networking, but also discovered some voluntary projects aimed at providing community wireless access in local area.

The following wireless communities drawn me attention of their success:

• SeattleWireless is a not-for-profit effort to develop a wireless broadband community network in Seattle.
  Rob Flickenger is one of the active member and admins one the the node in this community network. I acquired most of the wireless networking knowledge such as hardware devices (from wireless card to antenna), wireless technology and node building from this site. Aweful lots of materials you will find useful there.
• Portland-based Personal Telco Project promotes and builds public wireless networks through community support and education. Just like seattlewireless.net, this site will help you find what you need to know in order to get connected to the Wireless Community Network.
• NYCWireless is another community providing Free Public Wireless Internet Service to mobile users in public spaces throughout the New York City metro area. Although the information from this site is very limited, it brings me to a Debian GNU/Linux-based pebble distro and the knowing of NoCat.
• SOWN (the Southampton Open Wireless Network) is yet another wireless community project in Southampton, UK. But the site provides advanced techniques to setup wireless meshing network and finally promotes transparent mobility!

I am currently experimenting a Soekris net4521 board loading pebble Linux and featuring NoCatAuth. As NoCatAuth is running in Open mode, public users who are able to detect the box's signal could be able to connect my node. As I see some success from the above sites and has been sucessfully build my own wireless node, I am now thinking of building a wireless community network in my own living place and rolling out my own pebble-like distro!

I've bought Linksys WRT54G for my home wireless network a while ago. As the 11g spec has been final, I went to Linksys site to find the updated firmware and downloaded the new 1.30 version. From their download page, I found a GPL link at the bottom. Following the link, it listed out all source code used by this router. Hey! My box runs Linux!

Afterwards, I googled "WRT54G Linux" and find some interesting information: somebody are discussing on how to hack WRT54G! One of the guy is Rob Flickenger, the author of Building Wireless Community Networks. The recent weblog entries from Rob is on Oreilly Network: