Host: groundzero.free2air.net
The host is a PII laptop running
Red Hat Linux 7.2 with patches. It's primary function is to act as a wireless gateway and support ancillary services such as authentication, IP forwarding & tunnelling, firewalling, and experimental dynamic routing. It is currently also running:
Apache;
mod_perl;
mysql;
scoop;
BIND 9;
DHCPD 3;
Net SNMPD;
PoPToP,
L2TPD, and FreeSWAN (for peering with other wireless and wired connections);
Wireless Card
An Orinoco Silver 802.11b PCMCIA card is used to provide the wireless gateway. This brand and model of card was chosen for a number of reasons including the ability to connect it to an external antenna as well as the wide driver support at the time for all Linux, *BSD's, and MS OS's. Have a quick dirty peek at naked pictures of inside the card - Orinoco Card (Top) and Orinoco Card (Bottom) (card picture credits).
Connectors & Cabling
The Orinoco Silver card has a connector for an external antenna, which connects to a pigtail connector, which in turn is connected to a lightning protector, followed by 50 feet of LMR400 coaxial cable.
Antenna
At the far end of the coaxial cable is an Hyperlink Technologies Omnidirectional 16dBi antenna is used to serve the local area.
Initially this antenna was mounted on a heavyweight industrial tripod free standing but ballasted on a street facing balcony (above a shop). If you are considering a similar setup, consider the results of very strong wind and ballast the tripod used to mount the antenna.
After positioning and testing, the antenna was moved to a rooftop chimney mount on a 2 metre mast rising above a very firmly mounted TV mast.
Client Connections
Zoo was connected permanently to groundzero in February 2001. You can read about the history of newsfilter in another posting. Other current connected friends include the sweet crew from Ambient TV, and the Mute magazine supported, grant funded youarehere project.
The current (but quite incomplete) groundzero client connection history records a reasonable number of incidental and semi-permanent wireless associations. |
