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Written by Shivkumar Jagannath
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Wednesday, 26 September 2007 |
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Ive finally managed to put it all together! I believe I have managed to build the ultimate embedded hotspot-in-a-box solution.
What
I have done is, put together Chillispot, FreeRadius and phpMyPrepaid on
the same box. While this itself is not unique, what separates this from
other such initiatives is that all of this comes on a 512MB Compact
Flash Disk.
The basic platform is a Soekris Engineering net4801
appliance. This has a decent 128MB of RAM and three Ethernet
Interfaces. More details on the Soekris box are here.
The
challenge was to look for a Linux distribution that recognised all the
hardware on the Soekris, and was small enough to fit on a CF Card. My
search lead me to Voyage Linux which is a debian derived distribution with a 66 MB footprint in its basic avatar.
Since
I didnt have a CF Card reader, I used my Nikon Coolpix n770 camera as
the reader. Attached it to my Ubuntu laptop and the card showed up as a
usb disk. Using the voyage installer was a trivial exercise. Once the
basic OS was installed, I then plugged the CF Card into the Soekris and
watched it boot beautifully over the serial console!!
Once this was done, I connected the Soekris to the Internet and ran apt-update to update the package list.
I then went about installing MySQL, PHP, Lighttpd (lighty) instead of Apache, FreeRadius, Chillispot and Phpmyprepaid.
After two days of fiddling around, I figured out why Chillispot wasnt working properly, rectified it (eth1 has to be 0.0.0.0).
I now have a full fledged hotspot controller which does not need to connect to any centralized Radius Server for authentication.
The Soekris box is currently undergoing burn-in.
The
only problem I am facing is that of MySQL tables crashing! I live in an
area where power outages are the norm. Thank you DLF for wonderful
buildings and crappy infrastructure.
High on my to-do list is change
over from MySQL to firebirdSQL (www.firebirdsql.org). Wonder how long
will it take to modify phpmyprepaid to work on firebirdsql...
For all your uber-geeks out there, I can send you a copy of the CF card image if you feel a little adventurous. #free -m reports
124 M Total 59M Used 64M Free
The total size of software on CF card is around 370 MB.
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Written by Jim Geier
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Thursday, 12 July 2007 |
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Mesh networking is making its way into municipal Wi-Fi networks, but use within enterprises is questionable. Learn the ins and outs of mesh networking and see if it fits into your wireless deployment.
Read more...
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Written by Jim Geier
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Monday, 18 June 2007 |
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Many protocols and RF concepts support the operation of a wireless LAN, but don’t forget that data frames actually get the job done. Learn how data frames carry information over a Wi-Fi network.
Read more...
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Written by Jim Geier
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Tuesday, 20 March 2007 |
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Wireless LANs certainly provide the freedom of mobility as we use our laptops and PDAs without the constraints of network cabling. Of course to facilitate this benefit, we unplug our devices from AC power and operate them from batteries. As most of know, however, 802.11 network cards consume significant amounts of energy that drains batteries fast.
Read more...
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Written by Jim Geier
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Tuesday, 20 March 2007 |
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Ultrawideband (UWB) modulation is beginning to take a stronger foothold in the wireless networking industry. While it has been used for a while by the military, UWB is now going through the necessary authorizations and developments for public and commercial use. Even thought the advancement of UWB has been somewhat slow, there's a possibility that UWB will become the "next best" technology for all types of wireless networks, including wireless LANs.
Read more...
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