Reminds me of creating a wireless access point using an old 80486 laptop and a ORiNOCO Bronze wireless card, a pigtail and an antenna. It was for one of the first free public wireless networks in Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan, New York, in 2001.
The bandwidth was provided by alt.coffee, a coffee and Internet cafe. It took some convincing to get the owners of alt.coffee to let me do this because they thought it would be bad for business. I had to convince them that people who could afford laptops with wireless weren't renting their computers, but they'd likely buy coffee. It worked :)
The laptop ran NetBSD and was installed in the awning of Accidental CDs a few doors down from alt.coffee because they were open 24/7, so someone was always at the front of the store. It routed its own private subnet that the NetBSD router in alt.coffee NAT'd and provided public IPv6 via 6bone.
I used 10BASE2 coax cable so I could run it along the building and nobody would mess with it, because it blended in perfectly with all the cable TV coax running on the outside of the building.
Aside from replacing the hard drive once, it ran for several years before regular access points became affordable.
John, at around that time you mentioned, you gifted me with my first shell account on one of your coffeshop servers, Reva. I just wanted to say THANK YOU. Up until then, I had read books about unix from the library, and had failed to install Mandrake on my laptop, but being able to access such a well configured NetBSD environment was really helpful and set me on a good path.
I had never been truant from school before up to that point, but sometimes life rewards you for taking risks.
You know, I'm still running servers with many of the same accounts that were there twenty years ago. Your home may still be on one (with the password disabled, obviously). Write me directly and let's see!
My email address is my first name @ my last name dot com, and my handle here is my full name.
Linux was good for me too, I escaped SCO and then dodged the bullet of NT.
It was so nice to switch from being tied to wires, to many hours with table service at local coffee shops in santa cruz like the Perg, and 420 union, in Santa Cruz. Sadly, both are gone now....
Man, I’m always jealous when I hear these tales of how things used to be here. I came to New York in early 2021 and my experience is completely different - it’s basically 24/7 grind and this kind of hacker fun seems inconceivable now. But maybe I’m just looking in the wrong places.
I rigged up something similar in my first corporate job in 2000, plugging an ORiNOCO into the PCMCIA slot of my corporate laptop and a spare at my desk. My boss, an old mainframe guy, was blown away that I could check email during the team meeting in the conference room without going back to my desk. Now wifi is so ubiquitous we don't even think about it.
I wish more thought about making wifi better. It could be so much more awesome now if we just sank more thought and resources into it. https://lwn.net/Articles/705884/
I live in that neighborhood today, and love this story. Don't have anything else to contribute to the conversation.
There are what look like "supernodes" for LinkNYC near the park, and somebody set up receiver hardware on my roof for the other network, but I haven't yet figured out who.
:blush: I write these days primarily about bufferbloat and network congestion control (and wifi), and have become more of a BOFH than then: https://blog.cerowrt.org
I really do, still, 25 years later, remember sitting on that roof, in the rain, feeling like the world had shifted into another phase, had transcended somehow.
The future was right there, spreading out in waves from our antenna, and from others. Not part of that story... but later on the woz got service from our downlink fella, also...
I just realized that nobody knows who mike taht was (co-author of that doc - and I do not know where greg's writing began and mine started, he was always more howtoish than I). Perhaps that is best and I shouldnt be popping up on this thread.(I changed my name to dave when I first tried to retire in Nicaragua because I was tired of being a computer guy and wanted to just focus on music)
I'd worry about some cable guy attempting to splice it before noticing it's the wrong thickness. I loved 10Base2 because it was so easy to install, no hub required. But apparently point to point is easier for most offices.
I used to build Linux router software that would fit on a floppy disk and run it in a 486DX2, for absolutely no reason except it was fun as hell. Made a nice web UI, packed in a ton of advanced features. Wanted to try and start a company to sell little open source routers, but then I found out cheap routers were quite hard to make money on, so I became a sysadmin instead and mostly browsed Slashdot for 10 years. My big regret is not becoming a musician or woodworker instead.
Did something similar-ish, except using an old 386 motherboard packed to the gills with 30-pin SIMMs. Booted off 3.5" floppy into initramfs. Init was a busybox shell script (@/linuxrc IIRC) to setup ip masquerading as it was known then, then it'd deliberately panic by exiting init while the kernel kept running the network stack with no userspace.
That little pile of PC debris eventually became a dialup POP for a local girl I met on IRC who was at constant war with her older brother over their shared AOL account, despite having their own computers w/phone lines. Fun times, those teen-aged years.
Linux was such a game changer back then, enabling kids to deploy their own ISP if they just read the HOWTOs and collected enough computer trash.
> Linux router software that would fit on a floppy disk and run it in a 486DX2
I thought this was me that posted this and forgot I posted it. I did this exact thing with same equipment back in college.
My reasoning was slightly different. I did do it just for fun but also I wanted to run multiple computers and servers and the university was pretty strict on the one computer per connection rule.
In the early days of consumer broadband, routers/switches were these exotic things and the cable companies absolutely would not support the configuration.
the cable companies had no service worth a damn at the time. DSL was going to win... it really was... and the fiber folk were planning to deliver any day now...
I became a musician, and still hack on openwrt. I wish I had managed to make it into the space program, after the spaceshipone launches... Have a song about spacex...
> The total cost of each end of the router, including antennas and cabling, is less than 1300 US dollars, which is a considerable cost savings over the dedicated bridge units (typically about 3100 US each) available from the same manufacturer.
Adjusted for inflation, $1300 in 1998 dollars is equivalent to nearly $2400 in today's dollars. The $3100 manufacturer price would be equivalent to $5700 today.
Really puts into perspective how accessible computing and hardware have become.
I appreciate the loan from greg´s banker (his mom) all the more now. Without that... well, I still expect we would have had wifi, but perhaps only a for-pay-by-the-minute version from boingo. We (greg and I) later fought hard to get free wifi into the coffeeshops around the santa cruz and los-gatos area, trading free admin for free coffee as part of a group called thirdbreak. I am sad that our mailing list from that era has been lost to the copyright clowns...
What if I'd like to build a linux router out of modern hardware?
I would like to stop upgrading routers every two years (maybe just upgrade the wifi cards in it), and have full control over router's UI (command line is fine).
You should really look into Intel Pentium N6005 based mini PCs with up to 5 ethernet inferaces - they are very versatile and you can choose from different Router systems: OpenWRT, pfSense, opnSense and others. They consume less than 10 watts idle (most of the time) and about 25W max. Regular consumer routers consume 3-5W idle and about 15W max, so not much of a difference. You can even use a hypervisor and use VT-d to pass through the ethernet cards to the router VM. The only downside is that there are a small number of PCIe cards that work good as an wireless AP - mostly Mediatek based ones (some Qualcomm/Atheros cards work fine too).
I kind of gave up on using the central box as a wifi router, and just put bridged APs closer to wherever they are needed. Simpler, and you can do more stuff on your firewall that way (like use it as a NAS)
Not stupid, but you also have to understand the downsides.
I once did that, essentially just a linux PC with extra network cards. It doubled as a NAS too. One issue is simply that when you are playing with it (updates and all that), you won't have a router and you will lose internet access for all your connected devices. You also have to consider power outages (UPS highly recommended) and electricity costs. It gives you a lot of flexibility, but it also gives you a hobby. In the end I backed off and got an off-the-shelf router like everyone else, the server is still there, but it doesn't do routing anymore. Sure, I lose a bit of control, but it works, and solving problems is usually just "turn it off and on again", and I don't want to play hotline when my roommate loses internet access.
A compromise is take an off-the-shelf router and flash an alternative firmware like OpenWrt.
Also, why do you need upgrading routers every two years? Things don't move that fast, and widespread adoption of new standards even less so. If WiFi is the reason you change so much, you can buy access points and connect them to your router with wires.
> One issue is simply that when you are playing with it (updates and all that), you won't have a router and you will lose internet access for all your connected devices.
For my system, the only update I need to reboot for is a kernel upgrade. For everything else I can restart individual services, which leaves routing and firewalling completely untouched. And when I _need_ to reboot the thing, it takes right around 30 seconds from the time it stops passing traffic until the time traffic starts flowing again.
> You also have to consider power outages (UPS highly recommended) and electricity costs.
Power outages aren't a concern, as the rest of my networking gear isn't on a UPS. But boy, howdy are you right about the power costs. I've gone from drawing 12W _max_ (read as "_never_") to more like 20W _idle_, and way, way more if I'm performing updates.
> If WiFi is the reason you change so much, you can buy access points and connect them to your router with wires.
Yeah, I strongly recommend this. Separating your APs from your router is a smart move.
I've always been interested in this, but I was worried about the efficiency/performance loss. I don't really know how off the shelf routers work, but I'd assume most of the routing logic happens near the hardware... is this not the case? Or is linux able to move routing logic into the hardware so there's no significant performance difference?
My own reasons are
1. It's an extra piece of hardware, when I already have an underutilized server
2. The consumer router web ui is terrible, updates are painful, diagnostics are lacking, etc
3. More power with linux, and a consistent interface for it
While not Linux, look at OPNSense. It's a fork of pfSense without the bad behavior of Netgate. Will run on all sorts of hardware and has been utterly reliable for me.
I've been running a PC Engines APU2 (https://www.pcengines.ch/apu2.htm) for many years now. It has enough power to route over my gigabit fiber connection. It has mini-PCIE slots for wifi cards. If you want 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, you'll need two cards and run two instances of hostapd.
Not at all, although PFSense is based on BSD rather than Linux. It's incredibly full-featured (with even a complete and polished web UI) and pretty easy to configure and operate, and definitely where I'd suggest starting.
OpenWRT [0] OTOH is actually Linux. Also very full featured, including a GUI (LuCI) that even though some times lags a little behind the command-line and config file stuff, is still pretty good.
As another FreeBSD-based alternative, there's the PFSense fork OPNSense [1], which started out as a fork of PfSense after the Netgate takeover and complaints about their openness and support for the community.
Yes there's a lot of good content now with guidance on setting up one of these pf or opnsense routers. Really cool stuff. And use any old router you have in AP mode and you're set!
1) Modern routers actually use modern hardware. Nobody builds routers today with 2010's network interfaces or CPUs.
2) Modern hardware is only modern now. You can replace the wifi once or twice, but at some point new adapters won't fit the old slot on the MB. Then you need to change everything: CPU, memory, etc.
3) It will cost a lot more initially, then only a little less than a router when you replace the wifi card and then a lot more when you have to upgrade everythig (see #2).
4) Wifi cards have big issues with linux kernel/drivers. Many have no linux support at all, many are proprietary binary blob driver only, so you can't upgrade the kernel version, many are unmaintained and don't support new protocols such as WPA3, and many only support client mode, so you can't create access points with them.
5) Routers usually have proprietary acceleration for NAT and other network operations. Until ~recently, linux had no acceleration at all and even today, most routers are a lot faster with their official firmware than with OpenWrt or DD-WRT. With any open source linux you only get more flexibility, not speed.
6) It will eat your time permanently. There will always be updates to be done, incompatibilities to debug, bugs to fix, stuff to adjust, performance graphics to waste time looking at, logs to monitor... If this is what you want, go for it. Creating a linux router is very educational, but be warned that anything linux-related is VERY time consuming.
7) If you want to use anything else other than a SBC, or use a separate ethernet switch, it will consume more power than a router. Then you need a bigger UPS, which consumes even more power. Power costs over 2 years might be more the price of the router you replaced.
You don't need to upgrade every two years. This is why:
1) There are only a few standards that changed. You didn't need to upgrade unless you bought a low-end device first and then upgraded to a high end for more speed on the same standard.
2) You need to also upgrade the clients to support the new standard. If you didn't upgrade the clients, the new router was a waste.
3) Speed differences are significat on paper, but not so much in real life.
- 802.11b = you can have SD video streaming with this link
- 802.11g = you can have 1080p video streaming.
- 802.11n = enough for UHD videos.
Between b and n, speed increase is ~10 times, but the ethernet was always at least 10 times faster than any wifi and with a *reliable* connection. So if you are using wifi for heavy data transfers other than live video on a *mobile device*, then you're doing it wrong.
I have been working on openwrt since the mid 2000s. (the work we did on that wifi project turned into a job for me at the embedded linux maker, montavista - greg stayed on the server side and made a pile, I didn´t) These days I don´t really feel the need to upgrade my wifi all that much, as newer products have less range, and I still have just a picostation and ubnt AGW (running modern openwrt on less than a watt) that suit most of my needs. Firewallwise, I tend to reflash an old laptop or a nuc to run openwrt also, so I can run at a gbit plus. Most home routers still cannot forward a gbit in both direction at the same time, so it has become best to go with a good box to the isp, and wifi near your principal work/play locations.
For all home routers today - strongly recommend the SQM smart queue management) system that is actually a derivative of what we developed at that house, circa 2002, on everything - fq_codel and cake can help modern wired and wireless tech a lot.
I switched to generic amd64 machines for my main router and 2 access points and haven't looked back. Each machine has a Mikrotik R11e-2HnD for 2.4GHz (AR958x), and a Compex card (WLE900VX?) for 5Ghz (QCA986x/988x, surplus). I think the 2.4GHz cards are fine with libre software out of the box, but the 5GHz cards want a firmware blob (which I consider the same freedom/security concerns as if the blob were loaded from flash, like the 2.4GHz cards).
I use the 2.4GHz extensively for phones/tablets/NoT devices and haven't noticed any problems with it. I don't actually use the 5GHz too much it but it seems to work. As far as newer technologies, I've never felt the need to squeeze as much bandwidth as possible out of wireless.
The main router has extensive firewall rules (nftables) and VPN links that would be an unmaintainable low-performance mess on a born-to-be-ewaste consumer router. The distro used to be Debian but I've moved them all to NixOS for easier admin.
I hope you use sqm-scripts also. It works on any linux.
I have worked hard to make the ath10k work well on everything.
mt76 is pretty good now, the mt79, coming along. The wifi stack we developed for openwrt is now the default in linux for all these cards. https://www.cs.kau.se/tohojo/airtime-fairness/
Ath10k does seem to work well out of the box with no fussing. Thank you for making it work so well I can take it for granted! Otherwise I wouldn't really want to be in the business of tinkering with my own access points - one of the main goals of my setup is to get away from tinkering.
I haven't found a need for traffic shaping, with a symmetric Gbit fibre uplink. And if I had wireless contention, the first thing I would do is put a third card in each machine to use an additional channel.
Do you have any pointers to pcie (m.2/mini) cards that use chips supported by m76/m79?
The main thing I'm missing is clients being steered to the best AP. From what I understand this feature is really only found on enterprise gear (with patched hostapd and the like) and isn't readily available in the libre world.
A sore point for me, is that yes you do need FQ+AQM on your fiber link, and if you are running linux - you probably already are running the no-fuss-no-muss BQL + fq_codel combination on that uplink at that line rate. No knobs, it just works. These days you might want to try cake with no bandwidth setting as a default instead, there. No explicit shaping required, just the native backpressure from BQL.
It is unfortunately highly likely that your ISP is using something like a policer or tail drop on your downlink instead of preseem or libreqos, so believe it or not, shaping the downlink can help a bit more, in some cases. I am a big believer in actual measurements using the flent tool: https://blog.cerowrt.org
I find it weird that mt76/mt79 pcie or m2 cards are so rare. I would like it if they penetrated the laptop market where intel presently dominates with that.
Cynically the "best" AP may often not be the actual one you want. Too many best algorithms depend just on RSSI rather than (for example) sporadic interference on the same channel, causing jitter. A narrower channel width with less folk on it is sometimes better than a wide one duking it out with everyone else.
Depends what you want. Modern routers can have faster speeds than the base specs, and can switch easily between different modes (ap/bridge/mesh/etc). But yours would be more secure and less likely to crap out from cheap hardware. Use a mini/embedded PC platform (fanless + low energy), a network chip with good Linux support, and don't use moving disks, or write logs to flash, so the storage won't die. Should last you 10-20 years. *edit* just found this site, haven't looked for parts in a decade: https://pcpartpicker.com
For what it's worth, I put up an already old, extremely cheap TP-Link AP inside an old greenhouse some 5 years ago, and it's still working. Stopped working twice from being full of rain water (coming from holes in the roof), and it started working again after I drained the water and dried it for a few days.
I've been running this configuration for 3 years. There's no fancy UI, but there's also no awful vendor code involved. I don't think about my router anymore, and internet issues no longer occur inside my house, at all. It achieves line rate in both directions while also consistently maintaining less than 10ms of bufferbloat.
Build a nice x86 based router between your uplink(s) and your LAN (it can also be your home server), then get cheap wireless routers and run them in access point mode. You can shop for wireless routers than run OpenWRT if you want to customize a bit more.
If you're feeling really fancy, you can built redundant routers and figure out failover; pfsync is available on OpenBSD and FreeBSD which allows for nearly seamless transition of NATed connections. Much easier to manage if you don't have to deal with the scourge that is PPPoE though.
There are plenty of options, especially if you want pure router and can do wireless APs separately. One recent example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31454929 although it is opnsense the hw should run linux also nicely
Firewalla, Pretectli, and plenty of Amazon/AliExpress vendors sell little mini PCs with a bunch of ethernet ports. I use one running NixOS as my home router.
Re: wifi cards, I've not seen any wifi cards that seem like a suitable replacement to a dedicated AP. I just use a consumer Asus router in bridge mode instead of router mode.
One thing if you go with one of those random Amazon/Aliexpress pcs is ditch the power brick they come with. Those generic things are stupid under built and inefficient. Get a proper matching one from a brand name like Mean Well, Delta, FSP, CWT, Adaptertech, Lite-on. Really important if you’re running it 24/7.
It's a bit of a pain the ass from a hardware sense. OpenWRT is available & easy but there's quite limited hardware (newely no wifi6), but honestly, at this point, I'd much rather use a real computer and some add-in cards.
Alas availability of hardware- specifically AP grade cards & things to plug them into is forsakenly awful. One has to scrounge around for increasingly absurdly priced botique adapters with awful availability. Thankfully we're starting to see m.2 form-factor show up, but it used to all be mini-pcie or just mini-pci, which wifi and only wifi uses & is hard to find. Oh and for real AP grade cards, they have good sized heatsinks and sometimes require auxiliary DC power, which is just like two test point stubs you have to freeform find power for.
For a while Compex was making cards eith equivalent-ish performance (same chipset) to a popular longrunning openwrt router, the Netgear x4s, for significantly under $100. But modern AP chips are super hard to find last I checked, had huge-ish boards, and were over $200.
Its a long hope but AP over USB is something I did for a long time & was never quite right & I eventually gave up, after trying dozens of chipsets, but folk like MediaTek seem to be far lower bullshit than the past shady ass sorrid sad history of wifi, and it feels like it may come about again. The ideal world is that like a $100 wifi usb card would just work. And then we could potentially seed these cheaper things all around; not as powerful or capable maybe, but more than made up for by having much smaller cell size: the actual cure-all of wifi!
Im excited for a world where we get beyond openwrt. It's been great but it's a tight narrow specific fix, on a troubled set of platforms, with a lot of constraints. A small PC-based revolution would be great to see. Just run Debian or Arch, what you know. Have standard & upgradeable componentry for cards. It'd be nice for wifi to not be so very very special & bundled.
I too wish that we could easily use everything as an AP. My vision back then was that we would go meshy for everything. For many years I had full adhoc support (babel and batman protocols) and could go from device to device, from ethernet to wifi and back again, without losing a nailed up connection. I couldn't figure out why APs were so popular... the wifi protocol scaled then to 13 miles, now it barely goes behind the couch.
USB is a terrible idea for latency. CARDBUS was so much better. I hate usb audio interfaces with a passion, also.
OpenWrt has a place in that itty bitty boxes needed custom compilers and close attention paid to very small amounts of d and i-cache, which those running ubuntu + systemd have kind of missed, as well as tight integration with all the core tools like dns and dhcp and a zillion ip protocol encapsulations desktop OSes lack.
I see a lot of ubuntu and debian entering the embedded space now that cpus have got cache and memory to burn, and I do hope that one day we see more wifi pci cards that can actually function as APs, and antennas that work.
Presently that is hard to do - the iwl wifi6 cards kind of suck, and it is hard to find mt79 chips, and the ath10k was a huge step backwards from the ath9k in many respects.
I run OpenWRT on ASUS RT-AX53U (WiFi 6 - MT915E) and it works fine - as an AP only, it can manage 800Mbps and routing with no SQM 500Mpbs (using Software Flow Offloading).
Openwrt works fine but it's all so special. Special software running on special hardware. Just having a PC with a good card in it has soundsd greatly appealing for so long.
During the PogoPlug/SheevaPlug phase I had some nice repurposed hardware that ran upstream Debian, had good ram, and some capable atheros wifi. It was so nice having a less special purpose system, having just a regular computer that happened to have good wifi ap gear plugged in.
Openwrt "works fine" but it feels like a fallback position, something I have merely resorted to, for having failed to do what should be obvious & easy with everyday add-ins.
OpenWRT is itself ultra special. It has a very narrow mission statement. If you learn openwrt, and then want to runa desktop, you'll have to learn a new thing.
The special purpose nature of openwrt makes it surpemely disinteresting to me. Actually setting up a home network with masquerading, dhcp, some dns is shockingly easy with systemd. Add hostapd and some extras, maybe miniupnpd, traffic shappers, optionally some firewall and you're set.
There's a comfort & perceived desire to "make things simple for oneself" by using "tools meant for the job". But it's a shitty suboptimization. Openwrt isnt really that special or good, it's chiefly just the most aggressively well maintained way to run linux on a lot of little router systems. If that roadblock went away & we could use whatever, there would be a shitload more people trying new stuff atop much more general linux oses.
I've been using openwrt for over q decade. It's fine. It does the job. But it's an evolutionary dead end, will ne what it is forever, and it's a bit special. It has a bunch of NIH'ed smaller sized alternative tools that no one else in the linux multiverse uses. Their own package manager, their own dbus replacement, their own config systems. It's all generally fine but it's made practically no dent in the broader Linux world, it requires a lot of onboarding & learning to get actually decent at, it has a lot of constraints/narrow options, and it'd be lovely if we had any choice at all to run something else, something more normal & regular, but we've beem trapped running openwrt on these weird ass strange devices for almost two decades. It sucks being tied to openwrt, openwrt is the specia system, and having more generic Linux computing we could be doing here has such huge appeal.
I'd love do know how many people use x86 openwrt, for laughs. Dozens? A hundred? How many actually log in & use that machine with any regularity? Openwrt indeed can run on regular hardware, but in practice there's no reason to, no advantage to, no cause here, because if we have real computing hardware that isnt batshit insane & troublesome we immediately reach for mainstream regular Linux distros, not the very special opemwrt thing that exists only really for weird hardware.
> I'd love do know how many people use x86 openwrt...
I mean, if I didn't _explicitly_ want to use Gentoo Linux on my x86-64 router, I'd be using OpenWRT. OpenWRT is far more than sufficient for the typical home network, and generally quite good enough for a power-user's home network.
Regardless, I brought up OpenWRT on x86 to mention that OpenWRT runs and runs _just fine_ on non-special hardware.
> But it's an evolutionary dead end, will ne what it is forever, and it's a bit special. It has a bunch of NIH'ed smaller sized alternative tools that no one else in the linux multiverse uses.
This... isn't a problem? Like, not even a little bit.
OpenWRT, Vyatta, Juniper's Junos OS, Cisco's iOS, Mikrotik's RouterOS, Ubiquiti's Vyatta fork all use different tooling and have different UIs. Of the set, I prefer Junos (for its transactional configuration application and automated rollback), Mikrotik (for its weird little interactive shell), and OpenWRT (because it's more or less an ordinary Linux with largely-Linux-standard software, and the bulk of the rest of it is shell scripts that you can pretty easily understand and modify if needed).
I still use it on x86 a lot. The apu series runs forever on 5 watts. The openwrt gui is better than systemd. It is easy to setup vlans and tunnels on openwrt. That said, I do wish strongly that the wifi market would have a decent card for your laptop that would let it do ap mode well.
It's still possible and although it isn't linux we have things like pfsense too.
However, unless you're trying to do something special in the router a cheap router with openwrt on it would do the job.
Having done this for a few years, I can say that you should get a separate access point and leave OpenWRT for routing / switching only. I also have Mikrotik gear handling >1GBe duties.
I built something similar around the same time to share BigPond Cable. IIRC it was a 486 based machine with dual NICS, single HD floppy drive and FreeSCO^ Linux based router on floppy. It was very reliable, and lived under the stairs of my parents house until they moved.
The first wireless network here on the farm was based around a full tower containing an Abit BP-6 [1] with 2x366MHz Celerons (running at 400 MHz) into which I had placed a PCMCIA to ISA adapter containing an Engenius Senao 200mw PCMCIA Card w/MMCX Connectors [1] and two external antennas. That BP-6 - which used to be my development machine until I got something a bit more up to date - was fairly overloaded since it also hosted out mail, web services, surveillance cameras, file/print/etc services, media services and more. Still, it worked and covered quite a big area both due to the high-power wifi adapter as well as the fact that the antennas were placed on a high central place. I built it in 2003 and replaced it with a WRT54GL after a few years. The WRT54GL was killed by Thor and replaced with an Asus RT-N16 which also got killed by lightning, replaced with another RT-N16 which - you guessed it - got killed by lightning after which I replaced it with a host of cheapo 802.11g routers which also got blown up. Then I installed some large surge protectors (i.e. large and overly expensive MOVs [2]) after which these problems were solved. I now use a bunch of Xiaomi "routers" (flashed with OpenWRT) as access points, leaving the routing to a LXC container on the server-under-the-stairs. The BP-6 stands in the "museum" - that is stuffed away in the barn next to a number of other relics from the past.
And the single-disk router distro! In the Coyote Linux derivative I ran that for years, back in the early noughties, on the one of several beat-up parts machines I then had which could run two 3C509 cards at once - who knows how I laid hands on those, but once I got it working it was a reliable enough setup for the whole more-or-less group house whose slant-ceilinged back attic room I lived in. Unlike in the article, we were within DSL range of the nearest CO and had no load coils to worry about, so any POTS extension would do - hence being able to have the whole house's network ops up in my little garret. I had a couple of desks and tables in there plus my little twin mattress and an Ikea Poang chair - and, thanks to a long run of Cat-5 I'd somehow managed to scrounge, not only 802.11b coverage for the whole house with one of the early-model WRT-54Gs, but even rudimentary internet TV for the living room with another hacked-together beige box and an All-in-Wonder card bought used with an employee discount from the cheesy little computer store I'd spent a few months working at. We even had four-player Gauntlet with MAME and a few cheap USB 1.0 controllers.
Thin times by the standards of the life I live these days, but good times, too.
Booting linux on an internet café from a floppydistro because I didn’t really know what linux was and my parents wouldn’t let me try stuff on the “home computer”.
What was it, coyote linux? Can’t really remember now :)
Coyote, yeah! Same one I ran, and maybe the first time I ever actually put Linux to a useful purpose beyond satisfying my own intellectual curiosity - my first first time being a few years earlier with a Slackware floppy install on a Toshiba Tecra laptop. I had to scrape together enough disks for the A set, download and image them from the Windows 95 install, and then print out enough docs to figure out how to get dialup working again once I was done repaving the machine with a then totally unfamiliar environment - I'd bought the laptop used with summer-job money and it hadn't come with OS install media, so I either got it working or I was just SOL, with no access any longer from Tennessee to the mostly West Coast-based social circle that Internet access had made available to me, and no obvious way to recover the machine to a working state. Luckily, it didn't come to that! Good times. :D
It seemed reasonable at the time. I briefly used a DEC Multia with two Aironet LM4500 PCMCIA wireless cards as a point-to-point backhaul and access point. That was a lot of money for hardware but the cable company wanted tens of thousands of dollars to bring coax a very short distance to the site, and ADSL in those days was still something you could expect to deliver just 128kbps upstream under ideal conditions.
And the fact that determining the true lat/long of one's location was best done by using mapquest.com (ah memories...). Unscrambled GPS for civilians didn't come along for another couple years.
I used to build small networks including supplying 386 boxes that booted LRP from a floppy to share a dialup internet connection for small businesses or university student houses. A lot were 10b2 internal networks since they didn't need to spend extra on a hub.
Later, I remember choosing a Cisco Aironet 350? PCMCIA 802.11b card over the ORiNOCO (probably on price as I think both had wide compatibility and good power output) to use both in my NEC mobilepro and with a few improvised long-range wifi links. I built cantennas and biquads to get remote access to free and fast university internet....
Also remember trying to get my hands on a Senao 200mW PCMCIA card to squeeze out more range.
Wonderful to see you all reflecting on that history and sharing your own stories. Fun times! I have a lot of stories from the 80s, for example from the armory geekhouse, where the di-hydrogen-monoxide scare originated...
Greg and I and Everett went on to many greater things. I should probably note it was his gf at the time that first caused me to learn how to solve some of the root causes of bufferbloat - she would run this game that ate our whole 1Mbit connection until wondershaper came along.
I am doing an AMA here, in late march, if you have any questions about what happened to me... or wifi... since 1998.
I think around 2002 I had a FreeBSD box running as a firewall/wireless router with an ath0 card (long since forgotten what that was) using a very old motherboard (might have been from a prior job in 1999 or so). Also had a Sparc 5 hanging off it which I used as a ircd and httpd server since that was just less likely to get hacked into running servers (and no cloudy anything I could buy back then).
Why is situation with wireless routers still so messed up? Barely anything new coming out has proper upstream Linux drivers. Broadcom chipsets are one of the worst offenders, but others are barely any better.
I have tried to fix the chipsets most used in openwrt. Presently the ath9k is best supported, the mt76 is pretty good, the mt79 coming along, and the ath10k, ok.
device or chip manufacturers won't spend the money to develop/support/maintain in-kernel linux drivers if they don't think it will ultimately net them enough of an ROI based on sales of the corresponding device or chip. the market for non-carrier branded, end user hackable, linux based home routers is pretty small and probably shrinking as a percent of the overall market for wifi chipped devices.
Wow. glad y'all enjoyed that little walk down memory lane.
I am still around and still working in tech -- although nowadays work involves poking API's to launch servers and related infrastructure vs. the time that this article was written where someone in my line of work had to drive to the datacenter whenever a server needed an upgrade or became unresponsive. My roommate at the time is still around too, his work is in the realm of reducing internet latency in routers by doing clever things with their packet buffers.
Some 5 or 10 years after the howto was written Cisco/Belkin reached out to us. Someone had patented putting a wireless card in a router, and they wanted our help with showing there was prior art. That process opened my eyes because to a couple guys like us it seemed like an obvious thing to do to put a wireless card in and network with it, like any other network card at the time it just had an antenna instead of a cat5 cable. Nothing 'inventive' about doing it, its just a logical step. I think they ended up settling so maybe that original patent-holder gets a couple cents on every wireless router, not sure.
I remember the hostname that document was served from when it was written, a tower PC hostname 'screamingslave' (NiN reference), and it served that document from the Redwood Estates (remote) side of the wireless link. 'for work' my work is all cloud infra, I still run my own personal server -- something I built and configured to run openstack, to be a "cloud in a box" -- hostname 'mantaro' (a reference to the river that is the source of the amazon), and that document is served from a VM running within, hostname 'immora' (doom reference).
It seems to be surviving the HN hug-of-death so far, but it was written in what was state-of-the-art for 1998, just a plain html doc, with maybe a css style sheet (did the original even have that?). Yeah no Nuxt/Vue SPA with some nosql backend.
If you wanna see another of my efforts in 98, I was also involved in bringing 'directory services' to Linux, tldr something more modern (at the time) than NIS, using LDAP for managing your users and other directory objects. That doc can be found here http://www.rage.net/ldap/ldapns-howto/
I never found out if they settled the case or not... I was quite irked at everyone about a patent that seemed so obvious...
Since then a lot of folk have come out to me about how we ALL were in just those few months, inventing the wifi future. We all invented it together, and you and I wrote enough of our bit down so everyone could invent more.
For those here that don't know my work on bufferbloat, I have kept on fixing wifi, with the outputs of the make-wifi-fast project finally the default in the linux kernel, and fq_codel/sqm/cake also covering the world.
https://lwn.net/Articles/705884/
wish it was taking less time for the news and implementations of that to spread than it has.
Ah, wow, a blast from the past! I wrote RFC2307 and {nss,pam}_ldap (which, to be fair, weren't the most robust bits of code, but I was a pretty green C programmer back then).
The bandwidth was provided by alt.coffee, a coffee and Internet cafe. It took some convincing to get the owners of alt.coffee to let me do this because they thought it would be bad for business. I had to convince them that people who could afford laptops with wireless weren't renting their computers, but they'd likely buy coffee. It worked :)
The laptop ran NetBSD and was installed in the awning of Accidental CDs a few doors down from alt.coffee because they were open 24/7, so someone was always at the front of the store. It routed its own private subnet that the NetBSD router in alt.coffee NAT'd and provided public IPv6 via 6bone.
I used 10BASE2 coax cable so I could run it along the building and nobody would mess with it, because it blended in perfectly with all the cable TV coax running on the outside of the building.
Aside from replacing the hard drive once, it ran for several years before regular access points became affordable.
What fun!