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DIY: Building A Wireless Freenet
techmuse writes: "Moshe Bar has an excellent article at Byte describing how he designed a wireless freenet for his community, and convinced his neighbors to participate. Most importantly, the freenet has resulted in new forms of interaction and strengthened social ties within his own local community (the inverse of what happens on the wider Internet)." And since consumer-grade wireless access points are now cheaper than a large hard drive, this sort of guide is especially welcome.
Byte is already /.'d, but here is my best guess: freenets are good, although the impact on the service providers will be detrimental. Data transmission, and ISP will become more and more a commodity, as the services become more standardized (think AOL allowing IM access).
Funny, they don't seem to mention all the other Windows based Web Hosting or Internet companies going out of business, the Windows driven DSL companies going out of business, or RedHat, one of the largest supporters of Linux, actually turning a profit when all other companies including IBM were losing money. But yeah those obscure companies they mention that just so happened to use Open Source software in their business, yeah it's the software's fault, not bad management.
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
consumer-grade wireless access points are now cheaper than a large hard drive
Where are you buying them that cheap? I just bought a 40 GB for $100, I have yet to see an access point anywhere near that.
The problem was with everyone not wanting to pay. It would have been T-1 access to every home for about 70 dollars per month. Every home built out there would have a 24 port hub and CAT 5 wiring as part of the house.
I have also wondered why this has not caught on, considering hotels and dorm rooms at schools have this technology implemented just fine.
Click here or here.
I always thought one way to roll out the mobile internet is to create a freenet like network between all the mobile nodes. Every device acts as a node for the network and can route data to nearby nodes.
For argument sake, lets say that each device can transmit up to 100ft. You however want to connect to a node that is 200ft. away. Luckly there is a node in between you that can route the information between you. Lets say you want to connect to someone miles away, well the same rules apply, just keep hoping until you find the host. Certain internet access points would be established too to keep wireless trafic to a minimum (for less hops) as well as routing traffic to nodes outside of your range.
This would take some pretty fancy routing but I think it would be possible. If these nodes were added to every device that can use them (cell phones, pdas, radios, etc) then the network will quickly form. It may not be as ideal as other wireless network topolgies, but it is better than nothing at all, like we have right now!
actually, if you paid attention to the news at all, the NASDAQ $1 delisting rule has been suspended for a few months. I believe until January of 2002
Wow, this is a great idea. But the application I'd really like to see is a T3 (or better) being pretty much standard coming into eavery big apartment building, or city block. Using wireless could save so much on infrastructure costs that it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect high-speed internet to be cheap and accessible almost universally. Between this and sub-$700 PCs, we could have most of the population online very soon... and maybe an ubiquity of online communication would make everyone's life better.
Or maybe I'm just a geek.
telekon
To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.
So, wait a minute... what does this have to do with Freenet?
uh ok, and how is this off topic? It's IN THE ARTICLE.
This is exactly what we want to see -- hobbyists helping hobbyists. It might not make money, but it's a valuable contribution to the community, both real-world and virtual.
True, not everyone has the expertise available to set up several servers/firewalls/NAT boxes, and this could well be the major challenge facing Open Source. Someone should put together a wireless_net.rpm 'For Idiots' or similar, then finally things will start to change.
Local networks are probably going to be the wave of the future as costs decrease and several-PC homes start to become more common. Experiments like this, pushing forward the mass application of such technology, should be happening everywhere.
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Its excellent to see the way the participants work together for their common good..
Where do you want to be, What are you doing to get there.
This is an interesting idea. I've been seriously considering buying a wireless network card and a base station. The article says that the author uses Linksys, Intel, and 3Com NICs, but I'm still skeptical about the best deal. What's the cheapest wireless NIC out there, of decent quality? Any specific recommendations?
I have a feeling it's because many people don't care about internet access enough to pay $70/month for it, and many more (myself included) would rather pay $40/month for a personal DSL connection, considering that if you get a good provider, a DSL connection can be every bit as fast as T1.
As for all the other perks, I doubt joe schmoe has a use for unlimited webspace or sees a need for backed up filespace on the network.
Hotels and dorm rooms are an entirely different issue in many peoples' minds, especially since the costs are very different. . . My school has an OC3 connection, but when you divide the cost among 1,200 students, the cost is much less per person. As for hotels, if they even jump the price by $5/night, that ends up being a potential of $150/month per room, but to the person leasing the room it's still an okay price because if you want internet access bad enough to have it in your hotel room, you're probably willing to pay $5 for a night of it.
The greatest thing about the BBS days (other than TradeWars and OOII) was that you were connecting to people nearby. Though you never met face-to-face, it was still nice to know that they were in the same area. I would love to find a local web site in my area that was focused exclusively on my neighborhood. Alas, I can find none. We don't need a wireless freenet, we just need better focused sites. People say we're anti-social, but computers have ALWAYS been about connecting people to people!
They are such a great idea that I'm sure that this will be lobbied against by big corps like AOL/Time Warner and eventually be likened to terrorism SOMEHOW if they ever catch on.
Sorry if I'm pessemistic, but at the rate things are going, I have no reason to believe these won't be made illegal in the near future.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
If my cable company found out about this somehow, they would pull by connection so fast, half our house would go with the wall plate. Then of course I'd be stuck because there's not a terrific variety of reliable vendors to choose from in our neck of the woods. So it would have to be low-key, somehow.
Besides, more than a few people would likely saturate the upstream on almost any cable modem and many DSL's. Any words of wisdom for those of us with 10 Mbit pipes running into our house?
How about, for example, a peer-peer setup with multiple cable modem gateways splitting the load?
Would that work with multiple base stations?
The author was very lucky to have a free 10mbit/sec connection.
Normal residential DSL lines include terms of service agreements that disallow any sharing of the line outside of the residence in which it was intended to serve. (that's how they make their money). This may not be true if you upgrade to a more expensive business class DSL line.
Freenet is a bad name for obvious already taken name reasons and that it is really a "cheap community net"
I want to setup a wireless network similar to this, but I wouldn't get my bandwidth for free so I'd have to charge a small fee to cover the cost of the T-1 or T-3 line. The main problem I saw was distance, sure I could put up a powerful antenna on my home, but what about everyones wireless cards? I figured I could transmit to them, but I figured their little antennas wouldn't be able to transmit to me unless I also put up a powerful antenna on each home.
Does anyone have some ideas about how I could do this? The chaining of access points sounds like a good idea, but there is the routing issue if one goes down, not to mention to cost factor of having one in every home, maybe one every couple of homes to keep a fairly tight network. Could someone point me to a good resource that describes how I could setup a network like this and make it work well? What about FCC regulations on doing this type of thing? Ideally, in the future, I'd like to provide a wireless type service to my whole town, are there any regulations for using a standard wireless network for profit like that?
I have so many questions about this type of network setup so if you want to e-mail me the answers and maybe we could talk off-slashdot, that'd be great too. My e-mail is pretty easy to figure out since there is no JeffSketch.com domain.
Thanks in advance.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
I am no expert here, but I've HEARD all sorts of nasty things about the insecure nature of 802.11b networks. If it does become popular to have free networks of wireless access, doesn't security become even more of an issue? I imagine lots of hackers watching all the traffic siphoned through their antennas. Can anyone comment?
I can't get to the stupid article, but I have a question. It looks like I'm getting a second or third floor apartment overlooking a lake widely used for recreation (eg take the boat out and anchor for a weekend). I'd have no problem offering limited access to the public, but I don't know if they will be able to reliably communicate with my base. If I make super-directional antennas, I cut out the periphery. Does the spectrum used for 802.11b carry well (eg bounce at short distances I guess) over water?
funny munging
Wireless solutions are great for local area networks and other small implimentations... I love the idea of a large wireless freenet, something huge! Lets theorize for a moment:
What if something as cool as this really did take off and become a world wide phenomena, much like the wired internet itself? I'm sure that bandwidth limitations would become a serious issue, especially since a large wireless net would have to make many more hops for packet transmittal. Theres only so much junk that can be crammed into thte airwaves! Either the FCC will have to open more bands, or we'll have to get really creative with our wireless technology. One way to help congestion would be to have strict restrictions on useless data transmission, like spam... which would be analogous with a "freenet" in my opinion.
Love the idea though... anybody want to get help get something started in the Portland, Maine area?
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
how attractive would a free wireless access be in a small downtown to techies? i live in a small city on the oregon coast, and economically, it is pretty much rock bottom. timber is on its way out, and many people have to look elsewere for work (big cities like portland and seattle). now i realize there needs to be other forms of economic enticement, but would freewireless access in a (empty) downtown area help attract people from crowded cities? you can bring your laptop and pda to the local cafe, and work while enjoying the ocean breeze.
i realize it's a crazy idea, but i would like to take my pda out where ever i am, and be able to stay connected.
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
It all comes down to scalability. Lets suppose you covered a small town with a mesh of roof-top radio AP's. Since you're probably interested in getting out to the internet you'll need some kind soul to forward your traffic.
Therein lies problem number one. Who foots the bill for the bytes?
Lets assume you can find enough people willing to contribute bandwidth for the good of the community or charge a small amount every month to maintain a dedicated line.
Now you'll note that the closer you are to the internet uplink the faster your connection is going to be (fewer hops). Anyone on the fringes of such a network is going to have to hop-hop-hop their way to the uplink. This is bad for the fringes. People right next to the uplink might _think_ they have it made, but then you remember.. everyone further away from the uplink than you is going to be hopping through you.
So, lets assume you figure out a static routing method that takes advantage of all available radio channels, avoids massive short hops and avoids overloading the AP's nearest to the uplink.
Plunk, someone between you and the uplink flips the wrong breaker and powers down their AP. Goodbye static routing. Clearly not an appropriate choice in this environment. Lets try to create a dynamic routing system for hundreds of nodes none of which have global visibility and none of which can be a point of failure. We'll need to ensure that AP's can be added and removed anywhere on the mesh at any time.
After all that, how much 'free' bandwidth will your 200-300$ AP investment give you? Enough to compete with dial-up modems. Maybe.
It's not all dark and grim. 802.11a is right around the corner and it's five times faster than 802.11b. It's probably reasonable to assume that 802.11* types of radio systems will only get faster over the next half-dozen years.
----------
I should mention that I work for a company that develops high-speed radio networks. Rooftop mesh might be the future, but it sure ain't the present.
From the article:
[quote]
The final aspect is the one of trust towards me. Since all traffic goes through my servers, and all e-mail is stored in my computers, etc. the Freenet members need to trust me. If they just slightly mistrust me, they would start using conventional dial-up connections to send more intimate or secret messages. This shows again the limited application scope of Freenets.
[/quote]
Why don't they worry about this kind of stuff with their own ISP?? "I connect to AOL because I want someone I don't know reading my e-mail."
Granted, it's a bit more embarassing when the guy down the street reads your love letter to Celine Dion, but why not balk when it's Earthlink, the FBI, or anybody freakin' else. Hey, I presonally would rather know who is reading my mail, so I can walk down the street and give him a PHP tutorial. (Pretty Humongous Pain)
But the reality that this should bring home to everyone, is this: Do you trust your upstream providers?? (Say at least as much as the Post Office?)
~Hammy (The unbeliever)
"When a government of the people, by the people, and for the people is attacked, which people are innocent again??"
If I were to open my wireless access point to neighbors, I'm liable for their behavior. My DSL provider isn't going to want to hear "It wasn't me, it was my neighbor.". So if my neighbor gets busted for kiddy porn, or for hacking some vulnerable server out there, I don't want to be the one paying the fines/jail time, etc.
So for now, the only people that will be allowed access to my internet pipe are people I know and trust.
I don't think people this cooperative live around here in Atlanta...
:-)
Hell; I'd be happy if my ****ing neighbors wouldn't use those "really cool" spread spectrum 2.4 ghz phones. I can always tell when they get a phone call, because all of my wireless nodes drop off the net.
I figured out who it was, though, when I picked up the handy neighborhood association phonebook and started calling numbers until my network died... now all I need is some neat way to jam their phone so they'll think "it sucks".
... and all I wanted for xmas was a magic 8 ball, but i got this lousy
Ahem, would you care to back this up? I know someone who was afraid to leave the house for a long time. After talking with people on the internet, he began to feel less disconnected from the world and began to venture out into the world again. I had long thought of the internet as something that kept people behind closed doors, but now I'm not so sure. I'd like to see some evidence before I'll believe the kind of sweeping factoids that the person who posted this article just made.
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
Brisbane Mesh
In Europe and Israel (where I live and work), we have 91.0 MHz overall to play with, and 9 channels, numbered 1 through 9. Of those 9 channels, 1, 6, and 11 don't overlap at all, allowing as many as three access points to operate in close proximity of each other.
Is it just me, or does something not quite make sense here?
A web/mail/Usenet/IRC/bind 9.1 cluster running LVS (Linux Virtual Servers, www.lvs.org) on 5
rack 1U computers. I chose no-name rack units that have been sitting around idly in my lab.
Each has 512 MB of RAM, 18-GB internal disk, and two NICs.
This guy obviously isn't poor, who in their right mind has five 1U computers lying around doing nothing. He could have at least been running folding, genome, seti etc.
Blah blah blah blah beowulf blah blah blah.
Ahem, would you care to back this up?
The author did back it up. He got together with his neighbors and had some beer. He's got each neighbor working with each neighbor next door to assure access. They're talking on IRC.
I don't know about you, but that's way ahead of my relationship with my neighbors.
-Waldo
It's neither the wireless aspect nor the Internet connection that's of interest to me, it's the BBS-like community that has come to exist around the network. I have no idea if anybody would want to use this lacking an Internet connection, but the community network aspect is fantastic. If this weren't hooked up to the Internet, concerns of security problems would drop tremendously, no doubt making adoption even simpler.
I guess I miss the old BBS community. Heck, I know that I miss it. Security was definitely a concern, but I knew just about everybody using my BBS. Or if I didn't know them, I'd get to know them at one of our monthly get-togethers. I've tried to move towards recreating the old community with cvillenews.com and a free community mailing list server, which is a start. But the concept of closing these off to the Internet at large and localizing them is fascinating to me.
Has anybody else set up an isolated metropolitan network? Any success?
-Waldo
Pc connection, both from linksys
I have 384kbit bandwidth both ways on my DSL line whereas most people have 768down/128up connections. Sometimes I wish I had that extra 384kbit inbound. What is the liklihood that a mesh with 5 gateways (using different ISPs) distributed over 20 nodes could provide on-average much better bandwidth to the entire network?
rR rather, you didn't bother to read the article. The point of a local "Freenet" is that of a BBS, not an ISP. Internet connectivity is secondary.
This sort of system is not intended to support 500 people downloading ISO's at the same time. Instead, it would download 1 ISO and store is locally, if at all.
I'm dubious, but open-minded. Somebody please convince me that this can be done, because I'd like to do it.
I understand that if you want any distance at all, you MUST use directional antennas, on both ends. Nobody makes them, so you'll have to roll your own. And you'll need a separate bridge-bridge setup per client. That's about 400 bucks/client. Then you must use a switch to divvy up the data, and the reviews I have read say to forget about encryption if you want reasonable bandwidth.
Is practical networking really possible with 802.11b? Or is this just another "gee whizz" article big on buzz, but short on facts?
+4 informative!!
...and so I found myself wondering just what is it that's new about a wireless ferret?
Writers imply. Readers infer.
Local web sites are a reality in Mexico. Some friends and I have been running a website focused on teens and their social activities in our city, Merida, Yucatan. Even the name of the site is relevant to our community Yukas.com (Yukas is shorthand for Yucatecan, i.e. from Yucatan). Although I have to admit that even though a community has grown around it, most of the comments and discussions are filled with nasty and insulting behavior, I guess it's just the result of allowing anonymous posters in a community focused on teens. If you can read spanish visit the site. By the way, I would really like to hear any advice on how to control the level of attacks on personal people, since everyone in the community actually knows each other, flame wars are really nasty and kids just hide behind anonimity to hurt other kids.
check http://www.wirelessanarchy.com or start your own page and get it added, pretty soon others will start contacting you and before you know it, you've created one in your hometown.
Is it a dream or a reality that a Global Independent Wireless Network is possible? What I mean is:
But I'm not knowledgable about this kind of thing. Is it possible? How long would it take? What is your opinion of it? But if it happens, it sounds like one of the engineering feats of the century.
From the article:
--
The bridging configuration of base stations allows you to turn encryption from 40 bit up to 128 bit, although this will surely slow down the bandwidth a little. In some countries, like France, encryption is not permitted except for ridiculously small keys
--
Can someone explains how much it would affect the
bandwith going from 40 to 128 bits ?
How often is a session key generated with 802.11b
and what is the smallest packet size anyway ?
By the way, encryption is totally permitted in
France since more than one year and, contrarly
to U.S., there is little chance of going back
to heavy regulated crypto. Use 256 bits
private key if you want.
for kiddie porn, slander against Scientologists, for, um, um...
what exactly are we afraid of here? What is the EXACT risk one runs by connecting a radionet to your DSL? Express it mathematically. Are you more likely to be killed in a car crash tomorrow? Cancer? Be murdered?
Is it mostly the DMCA and the Son of DMCA we're talking about here? If it is, damn them and run a Freenet.
The "risk" is mostly hysteria to the Nth degree. Kiddee Purn wasn't a threat to the republic when BBS's were running. It isn't now.
What we are really running a risk in creating these radionets, free from guvmint regs, is the specter of men on horseback ONCE AGAIN whipping up the panic over KP, Terrorist Encryption, and Copyright Violation Terror, and then we see the FBI rolling around the neighborhoods, triangulating broadcase nodes and arresting BBS operators for felonious and immoral behavior, ie talking to other people via a non-licensed digital medium.
Why do I see Prohibition 4 coming? First was the insane Alcohol Prohibition. Then it was the Drug Prohibition. Then, the Intellectual Property copy control Prohibition.
Four will be prohibition of networks without government saction, with nasty prison sentences. First amendment be damned, as we've seen these last few weeks.
Save the children! Save the Republic! Save the new profits to be made by the newly-rewritten copyright laws for the IP owning conglomerates of America!
Puritans can be defined as a group of people determined to root out other people having fun without consequence, and then punishing them for their sins. We are in a Puritanical phase in the US this decade.
I may be cynical, but I'm usually right.
As the internet becomes more and more commercialized, how feasible would it be to just eliminate it (for the most part) from the equation with something like this?
I see it like the old bbs days (when it was a labor of love, not money)... Communities of freenets springing up, and then connecting to one another, just like the old internet model. And if a subnet starts acting up (spamming, porn, whatever), you just cut that net off from yours. I mean, it becomes a manageable beast, you don't have to worry about out-of-date contact info's in bought out companies with "Who really cares" management?
I dunno, it sounds like this could be the wave of the future of "non-commercial" internet alternatives.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
This is not entirely related, but imagine lots of wireless freenets connecting each other - if they are big enough (many, many cities connected, some even running their servers on it) they can engage in a *peering* agreement with a big ISP, therefore actually getting a free connection to the "other part of the internet" :-)
I went to a meeting last night held by some guys from consume the net, a London-based community wireless project. The question-and-answer session brought up some questions that didn't seem to have been solved:
Overall, the guys running the project were helpful, and obviously trying to move forward by consensus. I think I'll buy the kit and get involved. However, there remain many problems with such schemes, both technical and legal, and it's only worthwhile getting involved at this early stage for the 'how does it work' factor.
you could use the Slash code to run the site ;) It has all the same moderation and filtering mechanisms that slashdot has.
Did you consider discussing it with them instead? After all, that was the point of this article: strengthening community ties.
I remember back in the day going to a couple "215" BBS picnics in Philly. It wasn't just BBSes though, also local chat boards (Philly Chat...).
I wanted to do something similar, maybe a private net that will be public. I have a friend who owns a few buildings within a few blocks of each other, and has money to purchase equipment to do this. His key thing was he wanted to use his laptop down at the local coffee shop. I did get some Linksys's to connect two of the buildings (pure line of sight about 800ft) and waiting on the antenna's.
I know all about the theory of wireless, and the fresnel zone and how objects kill signal but how well does that happen in real life? I know when i put up the AP in my house i could get down the street and still get signal even when i couldn't see the AP cause of the corner of the building was blocking view.
Anyone have some personal stories?
This wasn't intended to be a large scale net, but a small scale one. I believe he said that there were about 80-90 members. Think of it as a business-lan sized network. And think of it as being used for business-lan kind of purposes (i.e., most of the communication happens within the local net, only a little goes out).
... ok, "businesses"). It costs around $300 to get in, so not everyone joins. Still, think of a small business district (or one isolated shopping center) with a few blocks of surrounding neighborhood.
Now even that's not exactly right. Some of those members were themselves small businesses (I think he mentioned a library
Still, I'd been thinking of municipal networks as a reasonable choice, and this is an even more local option. Greater locality enhances the community building aspects. Sounds like an all-around good thing (though it probably has it's downside). It's worth noting the attention that he paid to firewalls. This is probably a quite important feature in his success.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
most of the problems with these kinds of network are connectivity to the internet... - the internet is over-rated, most i ever use it for is warez, news+weater, researh and instant messaging / email.
now if we set up a community network with a couple of old boxen running say a jabber server, an imap server and IDAP that would meet the instant messaging. a webserver could be set up to crawl news sites peridically and then make that information availabe to the network. everyone running gnutella nodes should handle the warez/mp3 part. To generate more interst you could probably run a few Quake servers and you would have a lot of gamers intersted (have u seen the prices for a dedicated game server these days????!)
If it was done in this way then we could keep this compleatly seperate from the internet
I'm really interested in something like this... does anyone know if there is something like a freenet going on in Chicago? Either wireless or not...