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.

Comments

BBS Days

[Kallahar]

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!

Re:Sounds great but...

[runswithd6s]

True, but hiding from the cable company isn't that difficult. There are a number of solutions out there to make your tcp/ip stack look like that of a Windoze or Mac box. If you're using some form of NAT'ing, the cable company won't even see your network. Sure, there are some more sophisticated ways of sniffing out NAT traffic, but is the cable company REALLY going to invest time and money to bust everyone doing it? Probably not.

Besides, with the advanced routing techniques available to Linux/UNIX/BSD style boxes, you don't have to be the sole upstream provider. You can peer amongst other Wireless users that have a full/part-time connection to the Internet. Imagine redundancy over multiple users whose ISP's in turn have redundant connections over multiple networks using diverse methods of connectivity (Cable, xDSL, Modem, Leased Lines, Wireless, T1/T3, etc). Add in QOS rules to classify, route, and limit traffic. If one of you gets picked out for incorrect bandwidth useage, you're not out of the game. You may have added latency and reduction in local bandwidth resources, and your community members would have lost a fraction of their total bandwidth. Guess what, you still win; you're still connected.