NZWireless meeting

Hi guys, i'm proposing a meeting this thursday at 6pm at Cardrona Speights Ale House, 37 Normanby Rd, Mt Eden, Auckland.

But open to suggestions to time/date

Purpose of the meeting is to talk about setting up a node building workshop, and network matters

i will try attend depending on work load tomorow. Not that im in the know or have anything (as i will be learning from you guys), but to show interest

Ok, maybe it's a bit too soon, i'm up for Thursday or Sunday

Can't make it on saturday, too busy

tomorrow is fine. JBS will be there. i'll be the guy with the laptop in his trouser pocket.

Thursday (tomorrow) at 6pm suits me fine.

For the Node building workshop I'm going to throw some ideas together here which we can discuss at the meeting. At some stage I might evolve this into a general howto but for now put up with it in it's raw format.

Here's what I think we need;

1 Somewhere to hold the workshop. Preferably someplace that has ample power points, is centrally located and has an Internet connection.

2 Equipment Each node builder should come with his own equipment. Perfectly this will include an old PC that has a p100 or better CPU, 32megs of RAM or more, a 50Mb HDD or better, an ethernet card , a CD-Rom drive and a Prism2 based Wifi card with a connector for an external antenna.

If possible, it would be good for node builders to bulk order the same wifi card. I have had great results with a Dlink DWL-520 (not 520+)

Outline of install;

1- Install Redhat (distribution open to discussion)

2- Configure Linux for console access So that monitors are not required.
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Remote-Serial-Console-HOWTO/

3- Configure SSH

4- Update Kernels with HOSTAP support Either by re-compiling or installing a stock kernel, available here; http://www.cat.pdx.edu/~baera/redhat_hostap/

5- Configure HOSTAP and Networking to ensure that wireless networking is functional.

6 - Install and Configure NoCat Auth and Gateway Available here; http://nocat.net/

7- Install and Configure DHCPD

8- Install and configure HTTPD (apache)

9- Install and Configure NAMED

10- Configure IPTables

11- Test address aquisition, end-to-end connectivity, captive portal, name resolution, routing and security.

12- Harden Linux Turn off unnecessary services and begin basic hardening using CIS scan; http://www.cisecurity.org/bench_linux.html

13- more /pub/beer

At this stage everyone should have fully functional, stand-alone nodes that they can tailor to their personal needs. Attaching antennas/pigtails can be performed at the owner's leisure to provide great coverage and integration to our fledgling network can be achived by making routing changes (e.g. using OSPF) and turning off NoCat Auth and pointing NoCAT Gateway at a centralised AUTH service.

I will need to bring;
1 - Copies of my config files.
2 - Various binaries.
2 - Linux install media.
3 - Serial console cable.
4- PDA
5- Laptop

I'll add more to this as I think of it.

-Simon.

It was good to meet with a few of the blokes and thrash out some ideas and discuss some of the issues.

For the workshop we still require a venue. If anyone knows of somewhere suitable, please post to the forums.

We've pencilled in Saturday 31 of May to hold the workshop, in order to give everyone enough time to gather materials. If for some reason this doesn't suit the majority of participants, it can be changed.

It was decided that Nodes built at the workshop would have the following features introduced (above those already mentioned) in order to avoid networking issues at a later stage.

1 Traffic Shaping will be enabled on all workshop-built nodes, so that operators can throttle the amount of data their clients can send to the wireless network or to their upstream Internet connection.

2 Addressing Each node will be assigned an RFC-1918 network for it's wireless interface that fits within the NZWireless network scheme. This will be configured at the workshop and will help to avoid network re-architecturing in the future.

3 DNS Each node will be configured as an authoritative DNS server for it's own third level domain, in the format

NODENAME.nzwireless.org

4 Authentication Each node that choses to use NoCAT will have a choice between installing a local flat-file authentication system on their node or configuring their node to use the NZWireless centralised authentication system.

Anything else?

wowsers

you dont check the forums for a couple of days and look what happens :x

i would really really like to come to the workshop

let me know

Bummer, the only weekend I'm away and a workshop gets held!!
Hope someone is gonna document it.

Matt

the workshop was a bit too soon, we haven't done any organising, or got any gear, so i've pushed it back 3 weeks, hopefully this will give us all time to prepare