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A Solution For Making WiFi Cost Effective

Posted by timothy on from the salt-for-leeches dept.

rkohutek writes "This whitepaper came out of my employer's desire to deploy high speed wireless internet to an underserved, mostly rural area. Although very easy to do on the ground level, I found it to not be a cake walk when it came to actually making it a viable network case -- in a "normally" deployed wireless network it is very easy to spoof an IP or MAC address and hop on the network and get free bandwidth. This is not acceptable and the acronym WARTA, Wireless Authentication, Routing, Traffic control, Accounting was thought up to cover the things that we needed to do. Read on for how we managed to make it work using Free Software: HTML or PDF." Update: 06/07 20:42 GMT by T : He sends along word of this mirror as well.

19 of 120 comments (clear)

  1. Mirror by rkohutek · · Score: 5, Informative

    As an article poster, I saw that it was gonna get hit pretty hard, so here's a mirror:

    http://129.19.75.194/~jakalowiw/warta/

    Cheers,
    Randal

  2. Hmm... by DrLudicrous · · Score: 5, Funny

    Free software being used to keep people from getting free bandwidth. How ironic.

    1. Re:Hmm... by SkArcher · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Free as in Speech, not Free as in beer.

      --

      An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of /.
  3. How to make WiFi Cost Effective. by Malicious · · Score: 4, Funny

    How do I make WiFi Cost Effective?
    Simple, I use someone else's network.

    --
    01101001001000000110000101101101001000000110001001 10000101110100011011010110000101101110
    1. Re:How to make WiFi Cost Effective. by ward99 · · Score: 3, Informative

      It was shown in Wargames, but it didn't "Come" from it. People had been doing it (and calling it that) for at least several years before. This solution is interesting - I'm trying to get a WiFi network up locally to support a local AE beta. One of the concerns in starting a big WiFi project locally has been addressed by this artical.

  4. Assume the network is insecure by Megor1 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Just like with 802.11b you might as well assume the wireless part is insecure and use something like an SSL pipe to actually connect the user to the net.

    --
    Everyone that disagrees with me is a paid shill
  5. Free software? by garrulous · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Read on for how we managed to make it work using Free Software: HTML or PDF." I didn't realize that one could route wireless signals with nothing but HTML and PDF standards.

  6. Dear God! by PurpleFloyd · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Looks like someone finally found a use for PPPoE! I've wanted that damned protocol to die for quite a while, but I can see it being useful in this situation. DSL, on the other hand, is where it deserves to die a painful death, along with whatever suits decided that "emulating the dial-up experience" is better than an always-on connection.

    --

    That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
    1. Re:Dear God! by jjeffries · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Indeed, I use PPPoE to authenticate the folks around my hood that I let use my connection. WEP slows things down too much and isn't much in the way on encryption anyway, and with SSH tunnels I was getting about 10k/sec through the wireless--my gateway router is a P100, perfect for routing but a little slow with the number crunching.

      You'll need to be careful with machines conencting from behind a PPPoE link and force an MTU lower than 1500--I use 1412 and that seems to work. If you can ping and do other things with small packets, but web pages don't load, or load a little bit and then stall, that's a sign of an MTU problem.

      PPPoE also makes shared-equipment DSL service a possibility, for better or worse (probably worse, coming from someone who works for an ISP that owns their own DSLAMs)...

    2. Re:Dear God! by Junkster+Julian · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Looks like someone finally found a use for PPPoE! I've wanted that damned protocol to die for quite a while, but I can see it being useful in this situation. DSL, on the other hand, is where it deserves to die a painful death, along with whatever suits decided that "emulating the dial-up experience" is better than an always-on connection.
      This might be the only chance I get to remind everyone that v.92 is probably the most undersold networking standard any of us have seen in years.

      The v.92 standard (not to be confused with the simple v.90 standard) was released by Conexant (formerly Rockwell International Corporation, the dudes who helped pioneer MODEMs together with folks like USRobotics, Hayes, etc.) can interpret call-waiting signals and issue "modem-on-hold" command(s) to the remote modem.

      This new feature is "pretty darn" useful as it re-establishes POTS as a viable networking channel as users will no longer feel like they are being forced to choose between: a) receiving telephone calls, b) being connected to the Internet, c) ordering, installing, rewiring, securing, and budgeting an additional POTS line, or d) subscribing to "overkill-type" high-speed services just to send someone an email.

      Due to the sheer demographic penetration of POTS versus other newer high-speed and wireless technologies, ISPs might want to consider upgrading their modem pools to support the new standard (and market support for the new standard as the no-more-busy-signals-ever-again (and-we-mean-it-this-time) godsend it, well, is!). 'Nuf said.

      Greets.

  7. I wouldn't worry by rice_web · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Take a long time to look things over and ask: is the piracy worth the risk? If a few individuals use the service illegally, but you have a solid base of paying users, isn't that better than not entering the market at all and missing out on an opportunity or implementing a costly security feature that could mitigate any profit?

    --
    The Political Programmer
    1. Re:I wouldn't worry by rice_web · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Granted, I realize that the software was free, but what about maintenance and updates..... it is still a costly measure. I, for example, do not expect a virus-protection program to keep intruders out (I'd have to be naive), and this program certainly can't be foul-proof.

      --
      The Political Programmer
  8. I thought... by confused+philosopher · · Score: 5, Funny

    I thought we were supposed to make WiFi affordable by using empty Pringles cans and Floppy disks as the antennas rather than shelling out big bucks for custom made ones?

    --
    Why slashdot? Why not?
  9. Solution by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    in a "normally" deployed wireless network it is very easy to spoof an IP or MAC address and hop on the network and get free bandwidth.

    At my school anyone with a wifi card can get onto the network, but it just takes you to a web page where you have to put in a userid and password to access anything else on the network and the internet. They never ask for any information about your computer such as MAC address.

    1. Re:Solution by isorox · · Score: 3, Informative

      Hmm, what about coverage though? Regulations in the EU are a lot stricter (max 100mW EIRP for example, the 'A' zone - america etc, can do 4W EIRP, so you can legally stick a 13dB antenna on a 100mW access point. In the EU, you cant. Theres also issues with deliberatly broadcasting outside. I want to push wireless 6 miles from town to my (future) home, but as

      1) Thats in Greece. I speak 27 words of greek, and I dont want to try and explain the technicalities of it if the greek radio agency come round
      2) I'm only 40 degrees off some massive radar military dishes. I dont want to explain the technicalities of it if the greek radio agency come round in a tank with machine guns

      (Maximum legal power / gain)

      Any links that are more specific on the legalities across Europe (which I would assume are the same) would be appreciated.

  10. Re:AirSnort the PPPoE authentication? by rkohutek · · Score: 3, Informative

    We utilize CHAP primarily with PAP as a backup. CHAP offers end-to-end encryption of the authorization session, while PAP does not.

    Cheers,
    randal

  11. Re:Just a question: by rkohutek · · Score: 5, Informative

    On our side, the actual tower itself is pretty cheap. We started out with a single T1, (we're waiting on our third one to go in next week), $350 install for that, $250 for a used cisco 2501 + dsu/csu, we already had the AP and antenna laying around. And our tower is $200/mo ... so, the physical setup was, in total, maybe $900? CPE is running us right around $150-200, depending on which model is required.

    The OSS backend, though, is what I usually spend my day maintaining. Mail servers, billing, customer management, all that stuff ... man. I spend probably 20 hours a week upgrading / tweaking / maintaining. I'm sure that to startup, you could do it all for free with OS stuff, but it would take a lot of work. A *LOT* of work. Especially making everything tie together -- that's the really hard part. So to answer your question ... that's the really, really expensive part.

    randal

  12. McDonalds and Starbucks by Glonoinha · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Umm Starbucks seems to be able to lock down its Wifi, and McDonalds seems to be able to lock down their wireless connection (get a free two hour connection with a Happy Meal, or something like that) ...

    Here is a thought, stop at Starbucks, buy a hideously overpriced ice-coffee or something, let the caffeine stimulate your brain, and buy an hour or day or however they sell it worth of their 'net access. Whatever they do to keep you from freeloading ... that's what you do to keep folks from freeloading on your network.

    Simple. Don't reinvent the wheel, leverage the gazillion dollars Starbucks and McDonalds paid consultants, particularly if they use the same method ... if they both do the same thing it means that two different sets of consultants at $225 an hour were able to convince two massive corporations to go with it.

    --
    Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
    1. Re:McDonalds and Starbucks by swv3752 · · Score: 3, Informative

      They used a simpler solution: PPPoE.

      --
      Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life