Monthly Meeting Tuesday 4 th January 2005

PRESENT

Sean Rich Andy Jim Ben Paul Matt alex lloyd

APOLOGIES

Matt L Bails Sam Pete F

MATTERS ARISING

• ERN: Training to be completed. Physical work as per last month's minutes.
• Website: Came back up without the (rarely used) forums.
• Accounts: No progress.
• Backhaul: 5 community centres have expressed an interest in using Bristol Wireless for their Internet connection.
• Project Management: We need a day in a couple of months for Bristol Wireless people to discuss how we manage the project, and to cross-train on all aspects of the project. Sean to manage.
• SPAN: They have the money. Paul needs Windows expert to get Windows 2000 working on their machines beforehand.
• ECDL: No progress.
• Internal Mailing list: Ben G setting up on YahooGroups.
• Trinity Road: We need to wait until they have sorted out their upstairs. We will meet at Kebele until this is sorted.

ECC COURSES

ECC have asked us to run their (funded) training courses. Tall Paul & Sean will collaborate on the Wiki for training material. ECC will sort out everything except the tutor and the training material. Paul to manage way forward.

BANNERMAN ROAD INSTALL FEST

We are committed to this Saturday to go to Bannerman Road School and install machines. 3-4 people from the BLUG have confirmed, but we need more people. Sean will post to BLUG Underscore and the Bristol Wireless mailing list for volunteers. 40 machines are nearby, and will be installed with Mepis on the day. A network will be required to finish the install, which Ben will arrange. Sean is going to write two documents. One questionnaire for the users to fill in for our information, and one crib sheet for them to take away as reference.

NETWORK RELIABILITY

1. Twinnell House > Lab link is poor. -96dB without noise, large packet loss (401/402-0% to Twinnell whilst 10/46-78% to the lab). Needs realigning, and possibly another antenna.
2. WDS links still exist (Bannerman Road, all ERN, few locals). These need removing to improve performance. Matt hopes a new firmware release will allow WRT-54Gs to run as client devices without WDS.
3. Bannerman Road setup bad (cable losses). Could do with a twin-radio setup similar to Twinnell House (no hardware available). Directional antenna to the current network, and an omni-directional for clients to connect.
4. 2nd radio and directional antenna required for ECC-Twinnell link. We have the radio, and the antenna.

NETWORK TOPOLOGY REPORT

Matt and Andy to work on documentation. Report postponed.

ANNUAL REPORT & AGM

AGM postponed for 6-8 weeks to allow time for the report to be completed.

AOB