Update dashboard-Server

Not much to say then i'm in the middle of updating the dashboard-Server i run localy here. I simply use the trunk files from orangemesh and copy them by hand. Also i clean up some mistakes i made by the first installation and i already added some own stuff i found useful. We'll nothing special since my php knowlege is not the best but small bits and pices that make life easyer...

Nice Talk

On saturday i meet a manager of the housingcompany from the place i mentioned some posts before .On this place i plan to install a new repeater station for my backbone. So i met this manager to do all the contract and premision stuff. After we finished we talked a little bit about what i'm doing an what a wisp is, more in general
wice because he had no idea of this business. After a while said he heard about a guy who is planing a internetservice for low income poeple wifibased. I told him thats me
and explaind him that this is a siede projekt of my normal wisp and what im planig to do in the next month's . He was very impressed and askt me why i'm doing this and was wondering how that can coexist with my fixed wireless isp where the money come from. So i explained a bit more ..where i'm comming from and how i integrate the service and the goals of this projekt and also that since there is no funding ore something i plan to pay it b my self in a step for step plan. His eyes become bigger and bigger as i was talking and was very impressed about this plan.
Well we talked a bit more on this and was ending up with the statement that if i need any help on this i should let him now and i can count on him .
As a siedenote i should say that this man is the manager of the company who holds 90% of the buildings in the lowincome area in this town so its not all alturistic if he is helping to get cheap broadband in this area.
Anyhow for me it was a very nice and productiv talk i can say.

your spelling is..

..not aprobate enogh to write in this forum you may learn more english before posting again and as for your blog... man all i can say its horrible.

So i'f been told by a person yesterday after a post in a forum wich is very intresting for me.

So what can i say ..sure my english is not good i now that . How ever it was not my
intend to disturb anybody there on this forumboard so i dont post anymore there.

As for this blog ..all i can say: It is mine and it was not made with the intend to show
up how god i'm in spelling ore not and i dind't exspected that somebody is reading here. So i keep posting here no mather who like it ore not.

now i got ...

maps included in my dashboard server ..things are moving very fast
Still have to remove some mistakes i did but in basics it's running like charm

because..

...it was raining and very stormy this morning i coudn't doing the planed outdoorwork
today . So i did some more tests with the Orange-Mesh dashboardserver
added 3 nodes for the first and after some mistakes i made it's running fine .
..shasan gave me the right pointers to modify the /sbin/update script on the node so they can connect to a local dashboard server.I'm now adding more nodes and
start plaing with some extras like a css and other nifty things to get a little bit more comfort.

New Repeater

Today i was on Rooftop where i'm planing to set up a new repeater station .It is a 22 etages high building and about 1,5km away from next backbone repeater. Finaly i got the premission to enter the place so i startet today with the first test.
On this pic you can see what im using for normal 5ghz backbone links , it a 23db rootenna from pac-wireless with integrated radio pouch in there is alix board with a winstron cm9 minipci card . The mount is selfstanding stelit-dish holder with a 30kg
concret plate laying as weight in the groundframe, i often use these on flatroofs because they are stand very secure hold a lot of windload and do not penetrate the rooftop so there is no risk for damaging the roof. I'm planing to connect with this
rootenna setup the backbone an installt also 2 Nanostation5 from ubnt on this roof to sevice the clients arround this lokation. One of the Nano's will mountet on the same holder as the rootenna an one on another selfstanding holder on other siede of the roof.

Here som nice view's from the sorounding..potentially mch new customers

And at last here some pics fron the Nanostation 5 they are very nice and smal Ap's
+ the price is amazing the only cost 68euro here thats only one piont why i serve all
my custommers in 5ghz ..it dont cost more then use 2,4 ghz anymore and you have
a band with more none overlamping channels ///for outdoor in Germany you have
5470 to 5700mhz by 30 db erip total //






Sweet look i think.. i already have 10
of them in use and they perform very well.






If i have time enough i will ad to this station a fonera hacked with open-mesh and
build in a outdoor enclosure just to do some tests ..we will see.

Things moving fast...

since yesterday there is a open dashboard server avaible called Orange-Mesh you can find it here
It's very basic but the developers moving very fast so things growing .I'f already made a testsetup and it looks very promising.


As mentioned in a post before i recived 2100A/BC fornera s so it took me few coffees to flash them all but finaly they are ready. In the moment i build some PoE converters with a switching-regulator in it so i can run them with 18volt also there will be a power-on delay switch for proper reboot in case main power was toke off.

so still lot to do....

Waiting...

..for new releases of open mesh and Robin
The aktual release of Robin is from my piont of viewing very close to call it stable
there are only a few mini-glitches anymore wich i'm sure they will sort it out in the next weeks.
But there still other tings i need to have before i will set up a open mesh system in
a real world install. The first i'm waiting for is that open mesh opens up the management server software so i can run my own management-server in my own location. Second is taht they ingrate coova-chilli with the abillity to authenticate againsts my own radius because i already have running 2 Freeradius server's in my wisp.
Fom what i read they already in the middle of integrate wifi-cpa but tahts a hosted solution and if you have more than 1 portal you have to pay .

My standpoint alway was run as much as posibble in your own locations because thats the only way you have fully controle ..ore if you mess ist up it's your own fault.

Atheros Ap51 for my mesh...

..as you can read in some of my post's i plan to deploy a network in a lowincome area
to provide them internet they can afford.
Doing this means i need a hardware and firmwarebase with very low total cost because i'm still an comercial and this means i have to watch how much is leaving my pocket and whats comming in to it . By searching for an solution i found the open-mesh system it's based on Robin (Routing Batmann Inside) using open-wrt kamikaze for the Atheros Ap51 devices such as Meraki ,Fonera , ore the Accton OEM device open-mesh is selling. The Accton MR3201A they selling has 8/32 MB Flash/Ram and cost 49$ each ore 39$ in lots of 20 wich is a very good price. The only Problem for me is i live in germany an shippingcost for a batch of 20 is 250$ so i will end up with 52$ each wich is about 34Euros at the moment. Another option will be the Fonera from FON . They have 8/16MB Flash/Ram wich is still enough for the robin firmware . Fon is selling them for 14,95Euro in lots of 20 you end up with 16 euro each inklusiv shipping cost. So i desided that i will take the foneras for this projekt but the Acctons still have some pros because they have more ram and they are already flashed with the robin firmware and dont loose waranty like the foneras whenthey have to be flashed .
Another thing is you never now what fon is shipping to you, my first order of 2 foneras have been 2200 types they are easy to flash , my second order of 10 foneras have been 2100A/B/Ctypes they are not so easy to flash because you have to enable ssh with a hack and install redboot before you can flash them with the robin firmware. I had no problems flashing the foneras 2100 but i'm sure that it
may looks kryptic for beginners ore linux-newbys so the Accton device have definitiv his place.
p.s. i may write down the needed steps for flashing the fonera2100A/B/C in my next post.

Work on a Backup noc

..since a year i'm running a backup noc on the other side of the town to
keep the network more redundant.Yesterday i had to do some updates there.. here some pic's of the hardware i use .

It is a '19' rack, i use these because they are cheap and i dont have to ad extra fan's like in a closed box.















More details ....
The silver '19'box at the top is a loadbalancer wich is based on via-epia board with 1Ghz and 1Gig Ram. The os
is pfsense on a Cf-card ..so no moving parts
and it have 2 4port eth cards in it .
At the moment i have there 3 Adsl lines
with 6Mbit down and 512kbit up 1 34Mbit
symmetric line (fiber) plus 2 5ghz links
dow from my main noc. The smal silver boxes between the switches are Wrapboards running Mikrotikos they akt as
local routers one is connected to 3 Aps on the rooftop of the building serving local customers near by and one is connected over an EoIP tunnel to an other pop 2 Km away there ara also 3 AP's serving customers .Note the wraps will be replaced soon because they tending to be max out sometimes but since they are x86 based i can reuse them for many other stuf so they are not lost :-).

i hate this many smal AC adapters and i'm already working on redundant single 10A switching powersupply to replace all them.
The black box on the wall is the endpointrouter of the provider from the 34Mbit fiber its connected with a fiberconverter in the basement of the building . The red box on the wall ist a modemrouter of 1 from the 3 adsl lines.

The 2 slim size pc's are from Fujitsu siemens its the 600 series. they are not sold
enymore but you can find them for less than 100 euro in top condition on ebay.
I like them very much because they are very low power consuming an produce allmost no heat .They only have a 2,4ghz celeron in it but enogh to do many things in a network. The one on top of the rack act as my 2nd radius (freeradius/ubnutuserveredition) in my network the one below has 2 extra eth-cards
and act as router wich binds the lan-segment of the loadbalancer to the backbone ring it is debian based and rocksolid an i never had any problems with it .

some more

on tuesday evening i was talking to some poeple from a low income area and representives from the housingcompany who is the owener of the buildings there
about the projekt i mentioned in the post before.
I showed them a little slidshow what i plan and how it will work. The representives from the buildingcompany told me that the will give me access to rooftops and hallways of the buildings for free . On wendnesday i had allready a letter of conformation about that from them in my postbox hm.. looks like they are very interessted in this. My planing is to deploy a testnetwork there as soon as open-mesh
have integratetd wifi-cpa that i can manage with my own radius, and hopefully open-mesh opens up the dashboard foss that i can run it on a local server ...more on this later.

Full Day

..today will be a stressy day as often in the last time.
3 tings will be on the plan for today 1st replace 2 routers on in my 5Ghz Backbone because they tending to have not enymore enough horsepower to handle the load of the growing amont of customers. They are 2 pcengines Wrap2c with Mikrotik on it and i will replace them with the newer Alix boards from pcengines they have 533Mhz cpu speed and 256MB Ram wich is the double of the old wraps. Pure workingtime will be minimum 4h because one of them is on 10m high mast.

2nd setting up a new voip-pbx (Asterisk) in a multi-office building ..mostly used by art and graphic desingners . I'v alreday installed on the new box an teste'd everything on the bench so hopefully i get this done in 5h .

3rd meet a few residents of a low income area here in this town and talk to them
about the service i'm planing for them. Here some bacround on this.

Here in this town we have many low income housholds wich have not enough money
to afford a standart dsl-line. Most of them live in a large multidwelling area with buildings up to 14 floors high. My plan is to provide them a basic but reliable internet service they can afford. It will be only 400 down and 128 up but for that
they only have to pay about 25% of the cost of a standard dsl maybe lower.
In summer 2006 i was talking to the city administration about my idea and a very
little funding from them to give this project start. All they said was like ''we dont beliefe that you can do it with wirelss'' and '' we dont trust such smal company's like
you''. After this hit in the neck i lost a little bit my enthusiasm about this but it was still in the back of my mind.
Things have changed over the last 2 years, my wisp have now a good amount of customers and i'm on the point where all the time and money i spend bring back
a decent return. One of the biggest plus i have compared to 2006 is that i already have many backbonelinks near this area i mentioned above. I'm planig to use a very lowcost mesh-solution to hold the price per customer as low as posible . The new open-mesh system looks very good for this .
Readers may ask why a comercial like me is doing this? The answer is simple: i'm born in such a low income area and i grown up there. I had much luck in my live and was abled to find a good job after my education and collect a lot of expirence in more than 18years of employed working wich opend me the way to form my company 2005 but i never forget where i come from.

Here we go now...

um.. where to start .
I just started this blogg to show some of my work and interesst's so you will
se here much of ''wisp'' related stuff bcause thats what i am, a smal wisp who
is located in germany.
I mainly will post in english because there are not much wisp's located in germany
hence you can have in most locations here very fast dsl from big telco's.
So there will be may more interst from poeple in other country's where wirelles isp's
are more comon.