[nmglug] Some non-conventional Linux (and *BSD) platforms

[Bob]

At LCWA, we're looking to get away from dumb access points (AP) and do 
things like captive ports (ala nocat...http://nocat.net), some 
intelligent routing/firewalling/filtering, centralized logging, 
intrusion detection and so forth. Apple Airports currently are the AP of 
choice on our net, simply because we have a lot of them, they're very 
near bulletproof and quite MRTGable (they also run Linux, but with a 
netboot type of arrangement and NFS'ed filesystem...not quite reliable 
or optimal for us).

One reason we don't run nocat at present is that we use bridges, which 
mask true MAC addresses. Nocat (as we found out early on) doesn't like 
to see multiple logins from one MAC :). So. We've been looking at 
alternatives and have found a couple.

One is the Linksys WRT54G. Check out the WRT54G yahoo group and the 
WRT54g wiki at Seattle Wireless 
(http://www.seattlewireless.net/index.cgi/LinksysWrt54g). There is some 
truly amazing work being done on these units (one of the ones I'm 
tracking is James Ewing's at sveasoft...check out his FAQ at 
http://www.sveasoft.com/forum8.html). We're likely going to use these as 
our neighborhood (not long-haul, generally) access point devices, 
coupled with the Senao/Engenius CB3 bridge for the uplink. You can get a 
WRT54g for around $80 or so. Pretty cool.

At points that are going to be accessed by long-haul (up to 12-13 miles 
or more) backbones or users----yes, we have links that long---we will be 
using Soekris boards (soekris.com) running either m0n0wall 
(m0n0wall.org) or pebble linux (nycwireless.net/pebble). There is also 
another interesting board at PCEngines 
(http://www.pcengines.ch/wrap.htm), but we don't have any experience 
(yet) with them. They're significantly cheaper than the Soekrii and have 
all the features that we need for these points. We're typically using 
200mw Senao/Engenius Prism PCMCIA or mini-PCI cards in these.

Finally, it's quite easy to simply take an obsolete laptop and make it 
into an AP using any number of distributions out there.

The whole point of this was to hopefully generate some interest in and 
discussion about off-the-wall uses for free OS's. It's pretty amazing 
what's out there...the embedded world is about to get turned on its 
head, I think...embedded platforms historically have not been cheap and 
these price points are quite attractive.

Cheers,
Bob

Cheers,