Bristol Wireless Wiki - Seans Bw Blog

this page backlinks to SeanKenny - I'm a Bristol Wireless Volunteer. I try to get involved in all aspects of the group, for me Bristol Wireless is the solution to a social & political problem as well as a series of technical problems. I've decided to try and blog some of the day to day activity here.

Sean's Bristol Wireless Blog

2005/09/02

The Bannerman Road installs have begun!

We sent a big team up to Gratitude Road in Greenbank to do this install as a "proof of concept" for the roll out of the Bannerman Road School installs, Lloyds months of intense planning paid off with the whole operation going very smoothly despite initial confusion as to where this client would be connecting.

Lloyd used the Bristol Wireless ladder (my dad's old building ladder) to gain access to the roof and was able to establish that we had LOS to Twinnel which we had expected but not to ECC which was where we had decided to connect to in the last stages of planning. This was OK because ECC is currently still down, but might have caused some problems because the Access Point we had brought with us had been pre-configured for connection to the ECC pop. In the end this proved not to be too much of a difficulty.

The first step was to drill a whole in the bedroom ceiling where the PC was situated from the loft (which was really small and had little headroom, we could hear Lloyd banging his head a few times!) and run a length of Cat5 for Data and the PoE solution from the bedroom into the loft. The Cat5 got a bit tangled, which slowed things up abit, we think it would probably be a good idea to run lengths like this straight from the box in future.

Cabling

After this was sorted out, Lloyd went back outside to mount the Aerial and run the cable through the roof tiles into the loft, and I put plugs on either end of the Cat5 cable, which worked first time on the cable tester (thankfully). Lloyd attached the directional aerial to the TV attenna and connected the LMR400 length that comes with the pre-assembled aerial with attached male N-type connector to a female N-type connector on the extended cable run to run under the roof tiles(?) and into the loft. Rich assembled the extra length with the 2 connectors at either end while we were there.

More details on the connectors we used here -

While that was going on I was able to test the Linksys PoE equipment which booted the AP straightaway (looks like this is going to be a cool solution), I wasn't able to check the data side immediately because the OpenWRT wasn't chucking out IP leases which I understood it was supposed to and I didn't know what IP scheme we were using so I couldn't set up the static addresses. We'd had a similar problem at Warsames install 2 months ago so it wasn't unexpected (by me) and I knew Lloyd had it under control.

Lloyd completed the aerial install and came back inside the house to do the connections in the loft.

I'll attempt to diagram the whole installation at some point and plug it in here, don't hold your breath.

Configuring the AP and the PC

As I mentioned above the client had to be reconfigured to connect to Twinnel (after being pre-configured at the lab to connect to ECC). Lloyd sorted out a static address for the PC (he guessed (right)) and secure shelled into the client. He then reconfigured the settings in OpenWRT on the client AP for connection to Twinell and ssh'd from there to Twinnel to check the connection, which worked well first time. I think OpenWRT in AP mode gives a list somehow of all connected clients (note: must try and find out more about this), the new client appeared in the list. We tested the link speed by running apt-get update on the PC using Magico (the first update since the machine was donated in January) and estimated a connection speed of between 1 and 2 Mbps which was acceptable if not ideal.

A quick tidy up, and back to the lab to drop off all the kit, ladder to LLoyds for possible start of roll out next week, and then to the pub for a well earned pint. Total time was about 1 1/2 hours.

2005/08/16

Matt kindly did a walkthrough/workshop on installing OpenWRT onto the Linksys routers and then configuring for the BW network. I took some brief notes

(important note: please ignore everything below as Lloyd claims this process "bricks" the APs and until I can get him to look at it and tell us which bit is wrong we're stuck with nobody but him being able to do anything with them, ho hum! )

Kit

Currently we're using the Linksys WRT54G v.2 as clients on our network, our main advice for somone wishing to connect is to get themselves one of these I think we may have plans to sell them (pre-configured?) but I'm not sure, the admin overhead may be too high.

The WRT54G comes with it's own firmware, which is pretty good for configuring a home network and sharing a domestic broadband connection, but we want to provide and control more services over the network, so a more flexible open source firmware solution is preferred by the Bristol Wireless techies. The OpenWRT project describes itself thus -

?OpenWrt is a Linux distribution for the Linksys WRT54G. Instead of trying to cram every possible feature into one firmware, ?OpenWrt provides only a minimal firmware with support for add-on packages. For users this means the ability to custom tune features, removing unwanted packages to make room for other packages and for developers this means being able to focus on packages without having to test and release an entire firmware.

You can download the package from the OpenWRT site here

We use openwrt-wrt54g-squashfs.bin which is also stored on the labserver, I'm not sure what the arguements for this particular release candidate are, but I indertand it does have some read only parts of the firmware.

Flashing

Plug the router into your network and pick up an ipaddress or change to 192.168.1.2 this allows access to the default Linksys firmware gui interface through a browser at http://192.168.1.1 password admin.

Find the 'update firmware' dialogue, and update the firmware. Then reboot. This will take a while the first time, the DMZ light on the router will be solid green for up to 2 minutes.

At this point we'll probably lose some readers because everything reverts to the command line. There is a gui addon pkg being developed for OpenWRt but it's not in the default install and we're not using it.

Configuring

Telnet to the router still at 192.168.1.1 and change the root password - NOTE: If you use anything other than a BW password you must tell us, if any major changes are made to the network remotely you may find yourself disconnected

Reboot and then ssh root@192.168.1.1

The changes in the OpenWRT configuration that now need to be made are listed (in the form of the actual busybox commands) on our admin wiki (http://www.bristolwireless.net/admin/index.php/WrtClientSetup)- hopefully public soon. When they are, I will try and explain them all properly, but they break down into

removing packages (rm firewall etc.)
setting ip details (nvram set wifi_ipaddr= and many more!)
setting up internal (connection to ports) dhcp
other stuff (essid/channel/aerial etc)

Currently this is done manually, but we are developing a script to do this configuration directly from a client database.

and that was pretty much it! We tested the APs by putting them in LOS to twinnel and pinging so we assume they're going to work. One of them will probably be used at Gratitude Rd next week which is the furthest distance from Twinnel we've been that I'm aware of. I'll write that up here too.