The weather has been awesome lately, so it’s time to start having HackNight in the park again. There’s a Rubber Duck Regata tonight too, so if you have a rubber ducky, bring it and race!

Additionally, Vivace Roasteria on Denny is closing it’s doors to make way for Sound Transit’s Broadway station, so stop in and grab some of the tastiest espresso on the hill before it turns to rubble.

I’ve had my hands on an Eee PC 4G Surf for the past 24 hours or so (when I’ve been able to get it away from my son) and I have to say, I’m impressed. The eeeuser.com wiki has step-by-step instructions for pretty much anything you’d want to do, including Xandros tweaks, alternate OS installations and hardware hacks. So far, I’ve concentrated on getting the most screen real estate out of Xandros, and getting all my familiar tools installed. I’ve actually found typing pretty easy on it’s small keyboard, and the 7″ screen is really nice. Moving back and forth to my 15.4″ laptop is really weird now, and it feels like my Gateway is even bigger than I thought it was before (seriously. the thing is huge). My back already approves of the Asus.

I also got the Backtrack 3 Beta USB image booting off of a 1GB SD Card. I left my USB DVD drive at work, and following the instructions got me nowhere. Here’s what I did.

On my XP box:

Downloaded the HP Drive Key Boot Utility and formatted / made my 1G bootable.  For detailed instructions see this page.
Downloaded the BackTrack USB Image (946MB) and copied the rar file to the flash.

Removed the SD card and put it into the Eee PC

On the Eee PC:

Opened a terminal, and copied the rar file to a temporary directory on the SSD
Used unrar (included in xandros!) to unpack the rar onto the SD

The instructions failed me at this point by telling me to run bootinst.sh. lilo barfed, and finding out what was causing the problem seemed like it was going to take longer than I wanted. luckily I noticed the dos directory with loadlin.

Create an autoexec.bat with the following lines:

cd c:\boot\dos

BT3.bat

That’s it. reboot the box, hit esc when you get the bios screen, and choose the SD. Blam, you’re ready to inject packets and be a wireless pain in the butt. One cool thing about BackTrack (beyond it just being a good tool) is that Muts (one of the developers on BT) has an Eee PC, so you know any super irritating problems will get worked out by release.

We’ve been working on Node SeaCCP, a SeattleWireless node that covers much of Capitol Hill from the 30th floor window of the Westin building, and although my node already has strong signal from the roof, I wanted to see if we could connect with something a bit less beefy than a Metrix Mark II. We (Metrix) recently started carrying the Ruckus Metroflex (it kind of looks like a plastic taco) as a low cost CPE, and I had heard good things about the new Dual Zone (DZ) features, so I thought it might be a good idea to toss one in the window.

Just sticking it in the window, I was able to get 2 (out of 4) bars to swn-seaccp-yagi. Initial tests got about 800k through speakeasy’s speed test. Not bad, but I was sure I could do better. I added an Ikea mesh ‘plate cover’ to the mix, and bumped it up another bar and 2mbps. Not bad at all. I still haven’t spent any time messing with the angle to get an optimal install. I have a feeling if I get the distance right on the reflector, and actually point the thing correctly, I’ll be able to pull down packets a whole lot faster.

Dual Zone, enabled after a really easy one button firmware update, turns the ruckus into a single radio repeater, something that we’ve played with in madwifi-ng for some time now, but is rarely seen in a consumer grade device. I don’t think I’ll have a problem recommending these for people who want to connect on the cheap, and as an added bonus, I’ve knocked 15 bucks off the metroflex for the entire month of April.

Apparently the WRT died at the Joe Bar. Rob just stopped by to pick up my never-been-on FON router and is reflashing it with DD-WRT. You may go back to your regularly scheduled table camping.

For the past couple of days, I’ve been in the San Diego SuperComputer Center, talking to folks at the CAIDA COMMONS Workshop. It’s hard for me to accurately describe here what happened there, or what will come of it, but I did get some pictures, and there is a reading list. The one line irc summary would probably be something like.

“old Internet #0, making new Internet #1″

I’ll give a rambling talk about it at next week’s hacknight I’m sure. It’s one of those things that could turn into a really big deal ™

Michael Mee of SocalFreeNet was also in attendance, so a bunch of us got together and climbed up on the Pink Palace roof. Here is a shot of Sascha, Ralf, Michael and Dana up on the roof. A definite highlight of the event. The Canadian Michael was there too, but he didn’t make it out for the climb. His adventures were a bit more… gastric.

Saturday morning, Bryan, Andy and I hopped in the suburban and headed out for Magnolia Park. We several sacks of gear, tables, a wallmart tarp tent, and some snacks. Bryan was dressed most un-ninja like which was good considering the locale. It turned out to be quite the family affair, and a steady stream of visitors stopped by throughout the day. Our wireless setup was fairly dialed, a Net4521, 16dbi Vagi Antenna, and a 6′ bogen light stand. It and the VOIP ATA/Phone could easily fit in a carry-on bag, but would likely get you stopped and strip searched by TSA.

We weren’t really sure who would show up or what to expect out of the other groups save perhaps some Internet connectivity. Magnolia Park, being on a hill, facing west seattle, with only a few houses visible is not the greatest source of free wireless, but we were confident that the Alki group could not only see the city and it’s in-exhaustible supply of free radiating internet, but they had the will to make it happen. We had plenty of snacks and alt-tab to make us not really care about the outcome either way. Our tent protected us from the angry birds’ poop and the fall leaves without threatening to blow away even once. When Troy showed up with Pizzas, our levels of Internet interest hit rock bottom. All we really wanted to do at that point was play in the Bouncy Castle next door.

After the Pizza settled, and the VOIP phone started ringing, we remembered our ‘emergency status’, and attempted communications with our neighbors to the south. They seemed rather anxious for us to adjust our equipment at times (which we did not do, it worked fine) and asked if we could see their flashing LED flashlights amidst the glow of the booming Alki neighborhood (they could see our laser). We joined the IRC server provided by extremeboredom, and offered them pictures of our setup and tried to explain the wonders of alt-tab’s context switching effects.

Towards the end of daylight, the Gasworks crew had given up on their scheme to traverse a network in the city, and instead moved to Elliot bay Marina, a park of sorts, to link up. Their OLSR routes converged, and they joined the IRC conversation.

Successful at connecting all three parties, it was unanimously declared that too cold to continue, we should all meet at Magnolia, and bask in Matt Wilson’s german portable heat device. Unfortunately, the Gasworks people did not show, so we could not offer them chips.

More pictures are available here, here, and here.

Go check it out! ]]> http://seattlewireless.net/~mattw/2006/10/17/citizen-shift/feed/ 0 http://seattlewireless.net/~mattw/2006/10/14/field-day-testing-magnolia/ http://seattlewireless.net/~mattw/2006/10/14/field-day-testing-magnolia/#comments Sun, 15 Oct 2006 07:30:12 +0000 mattw http://seattlewireless.net/~mattw/2006/10/14/field-day-testing-magnolia/

We (Andy, Eric, Galan and I) went to Magnolia Park, in Magnolia. We set up a link with Ken and Bryan over at Alki ( Details ). It was foggy, cold, and we were surrounded by birds that wanted to pick our bones dry.

We had a net4521 running Pyramid acting as a point to point olsr adhoc link and access point. It also had a handytone ATA providing dialtone for our park phone. Everything was ball bungied to a 6 foot bogen lightstand. The soekris was powered off of a lithium pack, and the ATA and laptops at the table were hooked to an inverter and battery jumpstart pack. I’m pretty sure we could have powered the ATA off the lithium too. Getting the phones to work took a little longer than expected because neither of the ATAs that we were using had seen much use and nobody knew how they were configured or how to do IP to IP calls. It turns out the codec to use is G.729 as all the other ones led to horrible stuttering and weirdness. If we’re going to do any video conferencing on the real Field Day, we should probably figure out what codecs to use and any oddities in the software. No Internet means no google.

It appears that no dog walking Magnolia dwellers care if you set up a bunch of equipment on a picnic table and start ringing up old phones. This is really good to know.If it’s going to be this cold (or colder) on the 28th, we should really figure out *warm* food and beverages. Also, keeping dry may be a big deal. We need to prep for bad weather. By the end of the day, I really regretted not bringing gloves. Or one of these. If anyone has an outdoor propane heater, let me know. Video and art projects need to get figured out and tested ASAP. If you’ve got one, you’ve got 2 weeks til Field Day. What are your requirements? This is redundant, but we need to make sure any software we need is locally available and does not require Internet. Scans brought up a few APs, but we should not count on having access.

There is of course, more bad news, in fact, probably the worst news we’ve had; Atoys was denied it’s LPFM translator license renewal by the FCC, and is vacating the UPN Tower. This means that NodeAtoys is coming down. Yes, we raised funds, bought gear, paid a climber, ended up in the news because of it, and just a few months later, it is all coming down. Sorry folks, it was a good deal while we had it, and I only hope some of you got some packets through.

All of this may seem a bit demoralizing, and really, it is, but on the bright side, I hear HackNight has been pretty busy over the past few months, and people are engaged and doing interesting things.

Strangely enough, the network has come completely apart before, and even though things looked bleak, it came back stronger. I’m optimistic about the future of the project, and I know good things are just around the corner. Sometimes it has to get worse before it gets better.