[frgeek-michiana] Lab Notes, May 8, 2003
- From: Tom Brown <tbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: FreeGeek Michiana <frgeek-michiana@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 14:28:45 -0500
Lab Notes, May 8, 2003
:: Medium Term Storage Solved
Jay Schlatter and I closed the lab about 7:30 last night and drove to a
property 3 miles south of Bremen. Jay's buddy, Rich, lives there with his
wife, two dogs and a cat or two. The property used to be a dairy farm.
There is a huge quonset hut, big enough to store at least four school buses
if not six, and a dairy barn that is about 100 ft. long.
Jay and I chose the barn. The milking area is best for stacking pallets of
gear. We'll have to hand carry or cart material into the barn, but its not
too bad. There is some steel shelving we can assemble and use for small parts.
Rich says he plans to live there for at least five years. If he moves or
sells the property, we'll have to vacate the gear. Security is not good.
But we should be alright -- it is a very low crime area. Now that I feel
confident we have adequate storage, I will begin to solicit donations from
corporations.
:: Portable Demo/Training Lab
Jay has a wireless access point (WAP) and some pcmcia wireless cards which
are unlikely to be used by Goodwill. He is going to donate them to FG/M.
Also, Goodwill has an used electrical distro box which knocks 220v down to
four 110v/15a circuits. They hardly ever use it so Jay can loan the box to
us whenever we need it. The WAP and distro box are rack mountable.
Next steps are to obtain the right size rack and road case, look for a rack
mount server and switch and obtain six or so laptops or iOpeners.
:: T1 from Nibble
Thursday afternoon I spoke to Steve and Rob at the Nibble offices. Steve is
the owner and Rob the salesman. They gave me lots of information.
On the good side:
. Nibble will donate T1 bandwidth
. Nibble will colo a server for us
. SBC monthly local loop to the Sallie is $155
. Nibble is open to wireless and has begun their own demonstration project
for a wireless neighborhood
. Nibble doesn't care what we do with bandwidth
On the bad side:
. SBC monthly local loop to the Sallie is $155
. There are serious problems with wireless in older neighborhoods
. The wireless problems boil down to signal strength and to vandalism
. With 20 subscribers at $40/month the payback is 7-8 months for a single
wireless installation
Older neighborhoods have lots of big trees. One tree cuts signal strength
by 50%. Two trees cut the signal to 0%. To clear the trees and provide
line-of-sight for users you need at least sixty feet of antenna elevation.
Even then some houses won't receive adequate signal strength. Most of the
good downtown buildings for topping with antennas have been leased
exclusively to MicroVillage and other wireless providers.
Broadcast antennas can be placed about six feet above street level. The
best location is utility poles. Streets themselves are good for signal
strength: no trees, no buildings. Cars and trucks are apparently very
little problem if the broadcast antenna is at least six feet above street
level. But vandalism is a serious problem. Vandalism is ordinarily higher
in low income neighborhoods than in high income areas, by an order of at
least 100% according to Steve. At six feet above ground kids can easily
break antennas and kink coax. At six feet above the street fewer houses
have line of sight than at sixty feet so you need more broadcast antennas
to cover the same area as a tower. Most commercial wireless systems require
a metal box on the ground to house the amp and other electronics for each
broadcast antenna.
:: So What Do We Do
We're not ready for a wireless demonstration project. No T1 from Nibble for
now.
Goodwill has a block of IP addresses they aren't using. Jay will donate one
to FG/M and let us colo a box at the Goodwill server closet in South Bend.
He has four rack spaces and some floor space under a counter. Therefore we
will very soon have our own web site and revenue generating web hosting
covered at no cost for the short term.
At $155 monthly local loop charges for just one lab it makes no sense to
use even one free T1 right now. It would be better to purchase residential
grade DSL for the labs, at $50/month each. In 12-24 months we might have
enough revenue to consider a T1 of our own and a wireless neighborhood
network.
:: SGI Indy Web Server
Getting Linux on the SGI Indy will take too much time and effort to be
worth the time and effort. Jay found a second scsi drive to boost the
storage capacity. He also purchased a scsi cdrom or floptical drive on
eBay. But the Indy requires 512 byte blocks to boot, and the drive was
grabbing 2k blocks. The drive block sizes are preset and cannot be
adjusted. So Jay returned the drive.
Jay has a friend who works at Pfizer pharmaceuticals in Kalamazoo. Pfizer
uses lots of SGI gear and Jay's friend is good with it. The friend will be
visiting his parents in Niles very soon. Jay will hand off the Indy box to
him.
In the meantime I'll pull a 166-200 mhz box out of inventory and we'll set
it as a web application server at the lab. That means installing RH 7.3,
OpenACS, tcl, postgresql and AOLserver.
:: East Chicago/Gary Lab
Goodwill wants to install a low use lab in their E. Chicago/Gary building.
Goodwill clients will use the lab exclusively to write and maintain
resumes. But Goodwill doesn't have a budget for the lab. If the director at
the building is willing to let us, Jay would like FG/M to install a lab for
them and train a staff member. Jay will admin the network.
Jay has a postscript printer and possibly a server for the lab. FG/M can
easily donate four of our P90 boxes and nics for workstations. The local
supervisor will need to learn how to use a word processing application, how
to login from a workstation, and how to start, stop and reboot the server.
Tom
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