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Ask Slashdot: Updating a Difficult Campground Wi-Fi Design?
MahlonS writes "I am a retired network hack wintering in my RV in a campground in southern GA. 3 years ago I reconfigured the Wi-Fi system to a marginal working ability; It's now ready for a serious upgrade, prompted by a new cable net connection replacing a weak DSL. 5 dual-radio HP Curve access points connect to a 6th via single or double radio hops (effectively a Wireless Distribution System) in heavily wooded space. Unidirectional antennas at the APs (the APs are in water resistant enclosures) are placed on poles above the RVs, about 15 feet above ground. Primary hops are about 300 feet to 3 of the APs, secondary hops about the same. Signal measurements indicate that there is adequate RF between the access points. In 2008, average user count averaged about 30 users; newer devices (smart phones, etc) will likely increase that number (winter population total is about 80 RVs). While the old design worked OK when lightly loaded, I suspect that the single DSL line generated so many packet resends that the APs were flooded. This is a quasi-State Park, so money is always an issue, but there is enough squawk from the user community that a modest budget might be approved. The main AP connects to an old Cisco router. Burying wire is frowned upon, due to shallow utilities, and campfire rings that float around the campsites — sometimes melting TV cables. Since I'm not up on current Wi-Fi tech, are there solutions out there that would make this system work much better?"
Ah, getting back to nature and disconnecting.
Cables are the best choice, if you can accomodate them. You say you can't run them underground, so how about from tree to tree, suspended from a guide wire? I'd say that weatherproof cable attached to a wire is resistant enough. It's also cheaper than most radio-based alternatives and works a lot better than Wi-Fi.
I'd look into some of the fairly inexpensive openmesh routers...they're great for extending networks (or running jasager).
http://www.open-mesh.com/
Lower your transmitters a little. Signals propagate horizontally (perpendicular from the antenna), this is why you need to have an AP on each floor in a house to get good signal. Not because you're on different floors so much as the signals just aren't going in the right directions.
I know you're trying to broadcast over the RVs, but going over them also means no signal is getting to them in this case.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
It sounds like you're broadcasting from one access point to another, instead of from a wired connection to each access point.
Just run fiber to the access points. It's cheaper than you think, and forms a guaranteed, secure connection. Good for a mile, and it doesn't care about EM interference of any sort.
I am John Hurt.
we've got 5 outdoor ruckus ap's spread across our park. (fairly cheap too)
http://www.ruckuswireless.com
they'll mesh with indoor wifi ap's if you don't want to run ethernet to each one individually.
the "smart antenna" design is actually pretty good. it supports dynamic beamforming, multiple signal paths etc. basically it just takes the path of least resistance, which helps a lot when dealing with a lot of walls/trees etc.
you can give them a call w/ any questions you might have.
I would run two networks, a backbone at say channel 6, and alternate APs at 1 and 11. Get highly directional antennas for the backbone, and either corner-directional antennas or omnidirectional antennas for the access points. Run the backbones up high, and the APs 12 feet or so.
Try to eliminate any double hops via short cable runs and/or smarter backbone placement.
From what I got your primary AP (1) connects to 3 secondaries (abc) and 2 more connect those (23). They are dual band are you repeating only over the 5ghz segment on a different ssid? Routing rather than bridging as people tend to just directly connect to these so limiting your broadcast domain is a must. 3 wires out to a b and c should do wonders, you might want to try power line networking for those wired connections since you will reuse your existing AC wiring, keep the 5ghz as a backup.
No sir I dont like it.
Get a half-decent firewall. If you need to do it cheaply, get a small industrial PC, put OpenBSD on it, and use pf. This will allow you to set up packet queueing, which will allow you to prioritize acks over everything else, which will save you mountains of bandwidth in iffy RF conditions like that. (If you do wind up using pf, note that if you assign two queues to a rule, the second queue listed will get all the acks... this makes it very easy to get all the acks in their own queue(s). ) You can also clamp down on bandwidth hogs and set up QOS prioritization, both of which would help in that situation.
If you really want to fix it, firewall it AND wire it. Fiber would be best, but I don't know if you will be able to trench across the required areas- but if you have power at all these locations, someone probably already DID trench there. :)
You could drive 50 miles in any direction from my house and not find 4G. We just got 3G six months ago and only on AT&T.
Gone!
Ah, getting back to nature and disconnecting.
Ah, posting on Slashdot instead of reading a book.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Your opinion is valid. It's also subjective and irrelevant. And GP's post was rightly modded down for the same reason.
Dilbert RSS feed
This is a quasi-State Park, so money is always an issue, but there is enough squawk from the user community that a modest budget might be approved.
because they can pull money from the marketing budget first as a lure to get people to come as a checkbox feature, secondly because you can install $100 wifi webcams at the "cool places" (pool, lakeshore, whatever) so visitors from the UK feel comfortably spied upon and the promotional web page can have "click here to see the scenic lakeshore live!" buttons.
also they can pull a little money from the security budget, because the webcams can monitor boring yet important locations like the bar's cash register, the general store cash register, the service entrance, the equipment shed (the $20K nuclear propelled lawnmower, tanks of gas for the mower, etc)
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Take a look at Engenius' access points, I think their multihop repeater solution might fit your needs http://www.engeniustech.com/index.php/networking/solutionsdatacom/
On the other hand, if you think the DSL router's doing crazy stuff, maybe you should focus on making it not do that crazy stuff.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Putting wi-fi in a campground is contrary to its purpose. I don't care if the asker and the editors failed to notice this. I don't care if that rains on someone's little parade. It's a dumb idea. Whatever you're doing there, it isn't camping. It's using the Internet outside. That's my genuine opinion, and not only is it as valid as the asker's, it's more valid because it's more consistent with what a campground is for. Some ball-less soul-less sack of shit will mod me down anyway because he hasn't the guts to argue against me, but that's okay.
Except that a lot of people in RVs full time. That means their RV is their primary, and only, home. As such, they need access to their bank accounts, friends, relatives, news. For most people who full time, a campground with wifi is essential, at least once in a while.
My sister lives aboard a sailboat. Full time, all over the world. Wifi is huge for her. Without wifi, we do't know if she's alive or not. We have an RV; we don't fulltime but after 9 days it's nice to do laundry and catch up on world news.
We also backpack and spend a lot of time in the wilderness, so I'll stack my "camping creds" against yours any day. When was the last time you were in the wilderness, with a 2 day hike-out to the nearest trailhead? Are you spending your thanksgiving next to your computer, or in the high desert 20 miles from the nearest town?
I don't think one vendor will supply everything that you need, but you definitely need to take a look at uBiquity. We've used their NanoBridges in studio-to-transmitter links several times and have been pleasantly surprised. The stuff is ridiculously cheap -- so cheap that we honestly wondered what could be wrong with it until we tried it. (Less than $160 for a pair of NanoBridges!)
Ubiquity's Website
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
Opinions don't deserve to be modded down just because they are opinions. If that is the standard, your opinion on opinions deserves to be modded down.
As for wifi in RV parks -- I'm not an RVer, nor do I desire to become one. However, people who go to RV parks aren't likely trying to connect with nature. They are more likely trying to "get away" much like people who use hotels do, except they have to do their own dishes and make their own beds. Some people are into that and some people are into sleeping in a tent, though some might whine about the latter group too -- seriously, people using sleeping bags? Shouldn't they be weaving temporary blankets out of bark strips?
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
http://www.open-mesh.com/ .11G mesh, $60 for a router and another $20 for the outdoor enclosure.
The single band series is
The dual band does N, $100 for a router and $40 for the enclosure.
Either way you get mesh networking that's really damn simple to configure and has a public and a private network. Public can be open or encrypted, supports individual bandwidth limits, and has a splash page feature for logins or selling airtime. Private network is encrypted and unrestricted.
Love mesh networking. No cables, network topography isn't set in stone, you just toss another router into the mix wherever needed and you can cover wherever you want.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
Ubiquiti has some very cool products and customer support, you might want to look into their gear.
If you can get line of site from the remote sites back to the central site you should use 5Ghz for the backhaul, and 2.4Ghz for the client side radio. This will reduce your interference. Also, the backhaul should use _very_ directional antennas since the two endpoints are known. This will also prevent interference. It doesn't sound like any of your distances are enough to require a multi-wireless hop, although your sight lines may require it. Avoiding a double hop will increase performance.
You'll also want some intelligent QoS on both the WiFi and cable modem side. You don't want one user to be able to make the experience really bad for all the other users. For instance, if you had a 20Mbps cable modem you might want to limit any one IP/MAC to 5Mbps, or so. WRED or similar can also be your friend. Make sure there is a good local DNS server, as well
Then they aren't camping, are they Sparky? They're in a mobile home. What I said wouldn't apply to them.
OK, if you say so. Last time I checked, a mobile home and an RV are two different things, but I guess not. Hmmmm.
As for the cell phone tethering, that might work for some but not for others. Last I checked, cell phone coverage wasn't universal; it certainly isn't for me. And I pay for a campground so I'm not exactly "depending on random strangers"; I'm paying for a service.
First and foremost, how good do you want the wireless network to be? The CG's upstream is the key thing. If you can't get at least a fast cable or DSL line, having a good connection will be impossible.
If you just want one subnet and have some application throttle everyone, that is one thing. However, a serious Wi-Fi network in a campground will require multiple subnets, repeaters, IDS/IPS systems (because there are those who will be running nmap and other tools looking for an other target), pr0n blockers (so the CG doesn't get sued because Jane Ativan's daughter accidently found a shock site, but allows Joe Sixpack to browse his stash), traffic shaping (so one guy doing P2P doesn't completely saturate a shared network), etc. Don't forget to block BitTorrent so users have to use a VPN for their warez/moviez/tunez fixes. This way, you don't get a knock on the door from some copyright "enforcement group" or a pack of lawyers. In the US, if it comes from your IP, you are criminally and civilly responsible unless you can 100% prove otherwise, so locking out pr0n/warez/etc. and telling users to use VPNs out if they want that is the best policy.
I was asked to do a similar contract, but turned it down as I didn't have the time. The CG had a basic Wi-Fi system, but during a holiday weekend, the system got trashed where antennas were all destroyed/stolen. After the insurance claim got paid [1], the CG owner wanted to upgrade to a top tier Wi-Fi system. For one that had enough bandwidth for everyone in the CG, it would have to have to have a good upstream, multiple subnets, and a large routing infrastructure.
Of course, a campground can use a WISP like Tengo and let them handle everything, but you are then dependent on them on service, and it is yet another party to deal with that might force long contracts. A number of good CG owners avoid WISPs, because some actively add ads into Web browsing (think Phorm), and demand pretty stiff fees.
Just make sure, for the CG, how good do you want the Wi-Fi to be? There is a BIG difference between hanging a consumer level AP in the office versus even site-wide coverage with decent bandwidth for everyone even when the campground is full.
[1]: The CG now charges extra on holiday weekends, and has tow trucks and off-duty police on site. If someone is causing trouble and when asked to leave, says they are too drunk to move their rig, they will be arrested for public intoxication, and their RV impounded. This way, trouble is dealt with quickly.
That's amazing because when I used to travel I spent a lot of time in the western half of the US and I can't remember a single place not having service with Verizon. And that was over 2 years ago.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
It sounds like you don't exactly know where your problems are, so how can you solve them?
My advice would be to do some serious analysis of what's going on in your network. Hook up an ethernet sniffer to your internet connection and see what's going wrong. You suspect it's a lot of retransmissions do to the DSL, well find out if that's true. Consider buying a cheap spectrum analyzer (wi-spy can be had for under $100). Track when you get problems, and where. Throwing money and equipment at the problem is more likely to waste money and equipment than solve the problem. Since you're retired, it sounds like you're more short on money and equipment than you are on time to analyse and diagnose the problem.
Once you actually know what the problem is, then you can go out to the wireless community and ask for a solution. K You're seeing a lot of very, very different solutions here because people are guessing what the underlying problem is, largely based on what's worked for them. Obviously you can't follow all of them, but which one should you try? Knowledge is power, and ignorance is folly.
AccountKiller
You're not enjoying nature until you do it like this guy.
Ignore the haters. They don't understand that camping in an RV park is not the "camping" they are thinking of. It's more like a portable cabin, and it's a great way to get out for an inexpensive and hassle-free vacation especially when you have little ones. And you still have the option of remote camping with the same rig if you really want to disconnect. Or using it as a base camp to take tent camping excursions.
Sounds like what you really need here is to separate your "backhaul" form the APs. Since you can't reasonably use cables, you'll want to look into bridges that use time slicing, preferably on a different band than your access points. This lowers contention and retransmissions from the many stations you have that can see the AP they have associated with but not each other (so they both talk at the same time). The more clients you add and the more traffic they send, the worse this problem gets. Time slicing radios were designed to solve this exact problem, and are getting less expensive these days.
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
With line of sight problems and lots of water-containing organic obstacles (aka "trees"), lower frequency means much much better signal quality. Use a 900MHz WDS and many of your problems will vanish. I know Ubiquiti offers 900MHz kit, can't say for HP.
Stop being lazy and run freaking wire between the locations. you already have power there so you can run wire. you can use phone wire which is cheap and use ADSL modems for the links, again cheap.
Honestly there is no magical wireless setup that will handle the load, you have to run wire if you want to avoid performance issues.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
First of all, you have provided very little information about the terrain. One option is that you should find a spot where you have a clear line of sight to all the other access points and put a 5 ghz omni in there. Then, at the local base stations, you install one 5ghz directional panel and a 2.4ghz omni for the clients. Another option is to install four 2.4ghz sectors in one spot (assuming you need to cover a 360 degree area around it). But without some additional info about obstacles it's impossible to say what would work better.
You might try outdoor grade signal boosters. I've had some decent luck with them. There's no substitute for power. That might reduce the number of hops, improving latency and cutting down on retries.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
He's not there to get back to nature and disconnect. He's WINTERING there. - a place that he's already configured once for WiFi three years ago and now he wants to upgrade everything.
Putting wi-fi in a campground is contrary to its purpose. I don't care if the asker and the editors failed to notice this. I don't care if that rains on someone's little parade. It's a dumb idea. Whatever you're doing there, it isn't camping. It's using the Internet outside.
Not everybody at a camp ground is trying to disconnect. Some do it because it's cheaper than a hotel.
Some ball-less soul-less sack of shit will mod me down anyway because he hasn't the guts to argue against me, but that's okay.
Don't take it personally, he could just as easily be modding your post down because you're wrong.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
One for distrobution of service, the other for devices connecting.
I.E. each "point" will have 2 AP's, one which consumers directly connect to, the other which just communicates with other AP's on the site....
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
I live in the western US and I know of plenty of places without even vz coverage.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
While this appears to be spam, the idea is valid: One of the choices besides roll your own, is to buy a system. After all the farting around and buying parts etc. sometimes it is in the same pricing ball park to buy a system ready made to do what you want. Especially if you take into account the time you spend. If that is not an issue, at least examine the price points. I don't know a thing about mesh, but I would assume it isn't the only off the shelf option out there either.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Eh you can mod it down because he didn't go along with the premise and you just can't stand that ... but it's the fucking truth. Whoever modded this down is a pansy girlie-man with no functional testicles as evidenced by his inability to deal with a contrary opinion.
Evidently you can't stand the moderator's opinion that the parent is off-topic (personally I think it got off lightly). Is your resultant rant irony or rank hypocrisy?
Putting wi-fi in a campground is contrary to its purpose.
You mean providing network access where wires are expensive or otherwise inconvenient? Wi-fi sounds ideal.
Some ball-less soul-less sack of shit will mod me down anyway because he hasn't the guts to argue against me, but that's okay.
You got a -1, stop whinging and deal with it like everyone else.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
What's a "quasi-State Park"? Obligatory "Georgia is a quasi-state" joke.
What is that area really? Does Georgia allow people to live on public lands, even allow/provide utilities (however shallowly buried the wires) including cable TV and now wireless Internet? Do they make you move somewhere else to summer, after you winter in S Georgia? How often do you have to move? Do they charge you anything, like property taxes? Do you receive US Mail to your local address?
The setup sounds wonderful. Or maybe we're talking about the (maybe not so) ex Communist country Georgia.
Snark aside, my questions are serious. And it does sound wonderful.
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make install -not war
This immediately comes to mind, though admittedly I'm not good with wireless. My concern with this idea is will it fit your budget.
>
Depending on tree cover, 802.11n may not buy him much. 5Ghz gets attenuated by tree cover more than 2.4Ghz, and staying 2.4hz bonded channels reduces bandwidth for his backhauls.
May also want to swap out the router, depending on how old it is.
He said his ethernet conncetion is DSL -- it would have to be a seriously old router that can't keep up with typical DSL speeds. I've got a 12 year old Cisco 2514 that would be fine for DSL routing.
Some people take their retirement money and buy an RV and live cheaply and travel around in their old age.
There's nothing CHEAP about an RV.
OK, so Slashdot is answering your WiFi questions. How about telling us whether you get a better home out of a mobile home (integrated motor and driving seats, etc) or out of a trailer that you rent a car to haul the few times a year you actually move.
--
make install -not war
Combine that with Power Over Ethernet to run the APs, and the whole shebang is totally wireless!
--
make install -not war
Surely, any snowbird that can afford an RV can afford a 4G connection?
I don't think the OP's question was "how can I encourage everybody at the RV park to get a 4G connection for $80/month each." It was "how can I upgrade the RV park's WiFi network to improve the coverage everybody already gets in the park."
Breakfast served all day!
Does Meraki's equipment work installed outside, in a campsite? Or would it have to be installed inside the trailers? How about booster mesh points between trailers too distant for a single hop to work?
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make install -not war
Look at ubiquiti's stuff. M5 Wireless bridges out to to the AP's and UniFi [normal or long-range] for the clients.
www.ubnt.com
Nanostation M5 [5Ghz]: http://ubnt.com/nanostationm
UniFi: http://ubnt.com/unifi
Not as slick as Ruckus or some other stuff, but incredibly cheap. [Bridges are about $200 for a pair - and super solid, massive through-put. UniFi is about $70 per AP.]
You also get the ability to help pay for the system via UniFi. [Paypal subs, no admin reqd. Vouchers for "free" use etc.] That's all included for "free" in their system.
Plus you can use Pico's for outdoor use. Already weather-proof.
[I've not run the Pico's - so check it out in the forum: http://www.ubnt.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=48 - you should be able to get your answers there.]
It's really some of the best bang-for-the-buck for non super-high-density WiFi use around, IMO>
-Greg
Get off your High Horse.
Campgrounds serve a number of different purposes to different people. And the degree to which one wants to "get back to nature" depend on the individual. Wi-Fi is certainly well within the modern concept of a campground.
And why, if you're all into the get-back-to-nature thing to the degree that you seem to be pontificating, why are you at a campground at all? I mean with all those modern conveniences like, you know, hot showers and fulshable shitters? And what about that pay phone?
By the way, why not log in and pontificate your tripe with your user name? Afraid of something?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
What you're saying is that I don't deserve Internet access because I I don't live the way you want me to.
Get over yourself.
depending on random strangers
You mean like 4G network operators? I guess you must roll your own mobile broadband service.
Getting back to seriousness, most RV campgrounds cost money to stay at, and the money you pay pays for services like Wifi, kinda like the money you pay to Verizon for your 4G. This sounds a lot like what the OP was talking about.
Good luck with your radical self-reliance, though. I hope you have time to weave your own clothes while you're growing your own food and designing your own computers.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
I work with a local WISP and they use Mikrotik products running on all three bands (900MHz, 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz) and they provide networks for many campgrounds and parks along with coverage for over 11 counties. Using 5 radios with omni antennas and doing a WDS mesh or relay you could blanket the whole park for less than you think. Ubiquiti radios are okay but they don't offer the management and configuration options like Mikrotik products.
Meraki has outdoor access points available, but I think they cost more. Several RV parks here in British Columbia switched to Meraki this summer and have dramatically improved their reliability over their previous systems (purely anecdotal...other than knowing they went to Meraki, I don't know what else they changed or how much "better" it is, I just noticed I could connect consistently and with usable bandwidth, unlike before when it was hit-or-miss).
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
No, it was downvoted because it didn't answer the question, and therefore was irrelevant.
And yes, my comments in this thread deserve to be downvoted.
Dilbert RSS feed
What exactly gave you the impression that I'm a woman?
Dilbert RSS feed
So Meraki is basically WiFi equipment you rent and that's managed remotely by the Meraki company across the Internet?
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make install -not war
An RV is a pothole in the road, into which you throw money.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
http://www.open-mesh.com/ .11G mesh, $60 for a router and another $20 for the outdoor enclosure.
The single band series is
Mesh is great in urban environments where property rights restrict you from crossing roads and other people's land.
But mesh really makes very little sense in this environment. Its a fairly obscure technology, and getting it fixed and keeping it running may be problematic when the campsite geek's RV pulls out for the season.
Look, they have power to all of these router anyway. Why not STRING the cable or use WIFI over Powerline to feed the routers?
Putting in ground-burial cat5e is not that hard and poses no risk to the existing utilities. Its about $300 for a thousand foot roll. Two guys and a rented Mini Trencher can probably install all the cable runs in one day.
You don' have to trench it in more than 4 inches deep, and you only need to go that deep to keep people from tripping on it. You can hand trench when you get near your pipes and power runs.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Wireless and woods don't mix. Obviously, the only technological and economically viable solution is to cut down the trees, sell the lumber, and use a single AP with a nice powerful omnidirectional antenna.
But seriously, its quite astounding that no one seems to be working on this very real problem, wireless and woods (or wireless with obstructions). I guess the neato factor of wireless, that it works at all, is blinding everyone to the fact that it doesn't work when something is in the way. Someone really needs to fix that.
The Admin and the Engineer
And how did you arrive to such conclusions?
Dilbert RSS feed
I'll second the Xirrus arrays as being a good option. We use them in a school environment - so very different to what you require - but they do have several features which may be of use to you... The arrays all come with multiple radios (4, 8, 16 etc) and some of these can be configured to 'back haul' your data with a directional antenna while the other radios in the array provide a multi-directional network for your clients..
The outdoor enclosures also look really good - temp controlled and a rugged design that should be able to take a beating from critters/kids etc ..
Obviously trees / etc will cause nightmares - but with careful placing we've been able to serve multi-story solid concrete buildings with a single array (providing plenty of throughput for ~100 clients all doing network intensive stuff at ones) - so your mileage may vary... But they (at least in Australia they do) offer a no-commitment site survey which was better than I was offered from the other big names resellers when we were researching last year..
Forgot to say - they do come at quite a cost compared other solutions - but we went with them specifically because we could minimize the number of APs actually needed to cover the area.. ~20 arrays compared to ~100+ APs..
Wireless-N is probably not a necessity since it's bandwidth is probably much larger than your pipe to the outside world. There is some benefit to having the "last-mile" to the end user to be the bottleneck. so that one person can't gobble up all your cablemodem's bandwidth. Or you need to setup QOS or throttling to ensure a fair distribution of bandwidth. I guarantee at least a few of the RV'ers will try running NetFlix movies, at which point you're back to square one with people complaining that the interweb is slow.
Yes, this. I've installed two OpenMesh networks (and one non-Open Mesh network in a forest that used to be all WiFi but we went partially VDSL).
Running VDSL (or fiber) would be best, but if campfires are going to melt them, then an meshed WiFi is your best bet.
OpenMesh is especially useful because it's "cloud" based - you make an account with them, the AP's all check in with their server to see whose network they belong to, and then they auto-configure everything. Since you're only wintering there, you can hand the keys to the next guy and he doesn't have to know how to connect a laptop to a device to make any of this work.
The meshing is all automatic, so he doesn't have to know how to configure anything anyway. But a handful of extras, pre-register them, and then tell the guy how to look on the dashboard to see if a device has failed, and how to replace it if it has (depends on your enclosures).
Definitely get the "enterprise" model with dual-band and watchdog.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
One Xirrus WiFi Array will cover. It gets 802.11abgn all with a single unit 1/4 mile coverage any direction. They also have outdoor enclosures.
Were you born an asshole, or just well trained?
There is a wide spectrum of RV-ing out there. You can hit a RV park which essentially is just a parking lot with hookups. Or, you can go to a BLM dispersed camping site that is 100 miles away from anything and is only accessible by a 4x4 pickup with a camper on it, or a Jeep with an Australian made tent trailer.
Spam? You wound me sir.
I've done a mesh network before, just a simple little 2 router install for a local coffee shop/organic grocer. Their request was a wireless deploy for their customers with something to deter leechers, but also unlimited access for their own computers. Also, cheap.
So I just tossed a pair of routers up (one in the office connected to the DSL line, another freestanding in the back to cover the patio seating), then setup the public wireless open with a splash page set on a 30 minute timer. Click through the splash page to log in, 30 minutes later you lose access till you go through the splash page again.
It was easy, though the dashboard page is a google maps page where you register the geo location of the routers. Nice for topography, but obviously part of google's location awareness system (just tweaks a privacy nerve).
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
It looked like you were advertising to me but possibly not. That is why I said 'appears'. I also acknowledged that the idea of just using off the shelf solution is a good idea. It is generally cheaper in the long run to go with a pre-existing solution. I've tried the roll your own a few times and learned my lesson to really figure it out first to make sure what I am doing will actually be cheaper. And humbly admit that I have on a more than a few occasions tried the cheap route only to find I didn't save anything. Which is why I generally agreed with your post. Apologies if you weren't trying to sell anything. And I believe you weren't. Cheers.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Sorry bro, the post really is at -1, Offtopic. Deal with it.
It's not a mis-spelling: it's whinging. Comes from whinge.
So there.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
As a person with first hand experience on Cisco and HP Access Points, I have some disappointing news for you. There is no comparison between the Cisco and HP wireless gear. The HP stuff is repackaged Calubris Netowrk gear and it is kludgy, at best. I really, really, really have a shudder of fear when client select the HP stuff. It simply doesn't work well. The Cisco gear using a WLC (Wireless LAN Controller) is the absolute best I;ve ever seen. It's a breeze to install and performance is great. Keep in mind that when using a mesh, the bandwidth goed down 50% at each hop. So, if you have 54Mbps at the first access point, the next access points are limites to 27Mbps and the next at down to 13.5. This is under PERFECT conditions. Your distance of 300 feet is too far. I would recommend a mesh being no more than 150 feet outdoors. Preferably 100 ft. There are limitations to wireless LANS and in the end, your best bet is to create multiple meshes, each with a hard drop back to a switch. You can get underground CAT5 pretty cheap. Rather than running the whole mesh off one drop... have 3 or four of them out to the field and set up your access groups accordingly. But seriously... I would just lose the HP gear. It's so bad. I even yelled at the HP rep... just my $0.02.
Pro Tip: Never run power and data cables in parallel :)
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
SPAM is not just advertising, it is messages that are blasted out wholesale without thought to their destination. GGP is clearly not spam.
You're assuming that they have strung power to each location, but there are likely alternatives: solar panel w/ battery comes to mind.
In addition, the poster noted that burying cable is not a good option due to campfires. A few campfires over a 4-inch-deep cable could create a maintenance nightmare. That scenario suggests more strongly that there isn't strung power to the existing routers.
"Signal measurements indicate that there is adequate RF between the access points..."
RF strength is simply not enough information to determine the issue with your network. You've got signal/noise, echo and multi-path issues to deal with, at least, in a wooded environment. Saying you've got lots of RF strength is like saying that because you've got lots of volume in a loud room, yes it's loud, but you can barely understand the person you are talking to.
"Unidirectional antennas at the APs..."
Why? How are they connected? simply strung in to an aggregator and fed in to the AP, or does the AP have multiple antenna inputs designed for several Unis? Seems multiple uni antennas on an AP would aggravate the echo and multi-path issues I mentioned above and a single high-gain omni would be better suited.
This is all, of course, a dramatic over-simplification.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
Welllllll.... in my book, spam is advertising. Not all spam is advertising, but all advertising is spam. Clearly if he were advertising, it would have been spam. So I'm not sure where you're going with this one.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
We use Ubiquiti APs. Unifi Outdoor and NanoStation's. Very low cost, much easier to manage than Mikrotik although less flexible. We use Ubiquiti for all our APs and bridges and then a 450G for routing etc. Next year Ubiquiti will be releasing a Vyatta based embedded board that I expect will replace the MT gear.
http://www.merunetworks.com/
Unlike most everything else mentioned here, they use a very novel approach that actually works, and scales. The challenge you've already run into is that every node on the network spends more time performing collision management than actually performing work. As things scale, this will get much, much, much worse.
Once you see their approach, you'll understand why the others suck in any non-trivial production.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
Using WDS to daisy-chain links between APs is a pretty bandwidth-hungry way of doing things, potentially tripling the on-the-spot bandwidth usage of a single client.
While working at a school, the wireless network scheme I came up with was to get dual-band APs that supported multiple SSIDs and encryption settings. By placing the end user SSIDs purely on the 2.4GHz band and the WDS link SSIDs alone on the 5GHz band, WDS wouldn't be retransmitting on the same frequency, easing network congestion. It would also leverage the superb range of the 5GHz band over a direct line of sight.
The AP I selected for this (a D-Link of some sort, can't remember) had quad antennae, two for each band. I would like to have tried refitting the omnidirectional antennae on APs in the middle of WDS daisy chains with directional 5GHz antennae, one pointing at the upstream AP and one at the downstream AP. Whether the increase in raw signal strength could make up for the loss of teaming, I don't know. I had to leave before the project got out of the planning stages.