Some community wireless / WDS feasibility questions

[Fred Weston]

Meraki looks pretty interesting.  It looks like both the regular mini
and outdoor mini support PoE, but only the outdoor version comes with
their "non-802.3af" PoE dongle.  Anybody know how to build your own?
It seems like it would be much more cost effective to buy the basic
units and weatherproof them yourself, the only thing missing is that
dongle.

On 3/9/07, Stephen Ronan <listsubs0506 at comcast.net> wrote:
> [...]
>
> >Meraki is based on Roofnet (SRCRR), but I'm not 100% that they
> >inter-operate (I'm pretty sure it does).   If it does, it will run on PC
> >and Metrix Hardware.  Not on WRT.   Beware, it's full of NAT.
> >
> >
>
> I wish we could get a current version of Roofnet to work on Metrix
> hardware. Unfortunately none of the images released in the past year
> seem to. Whey trying to install them on a Metrix kit there is a kernel
> panic and I was told that the software would need to be recompiled in
> order for it to work successfully on the Soekris chipset.
>
> In regard to Roofnet/Meraki inter-operability there's enough divergence
> that one would be advised not to depend on any limited remaining
> interoperability continuing with future Meraki releases.
>
> With Boston-area colleagues, I've been using Roofnet on Netgear WGT634U
> devices bought refurbished for $50 or less, e.g, we have over 100 of
> them meshed at one 500-unit housing development plus a couple of WRAP
> boards. We had hope to mainly use Metrix devices for outdoor nodes but
> ran into the problem cited above as of a year ago.
>
> In regard to Roofnet, it's certainly true that "it's full of NAT", which
> has substantial advantages, as well as disadvantages in our experience.
> But Meraki has evolved considerably and one needn't expect it to be the
> same in that respect.
>
> Netequality has recently opened its online store to sell Merakis via
> http://www.netequality.org and has extremely useful mapping/management
> tools. See the documentation link.
>
> We're buying Merakis for several housing sites in Boston and that's what
> I'd recommend these days though I hope that fully free and open source
> versions of Roofnet continue to be advanced.
>
> Steve Stroh's comments on Meraki:
> http://www.bwianews.com/2007/03/meraki_another_.html
>
>  - Stephen Ronan
>
>
>
>
>
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