> True but the two people, me & Sam, footing the bills are unemployed. > (Beat that!)
...er, uhm - I'm "unemployable", does that count? I mean, I'm footing bills, too, and I don't even have such support as the Freenet generated. For instance, the Arts on the River event has a Virtual Private Server accout w/ Liquidweb.com (in Michigan). Part of the discussion regarding that account over the last few years has included questions about why this hosting is not done locally (in Columbus). My suggestion was that Freenet/CFn should open one or more of the servers at the NOC for domain hosting for local businesses. This is why I keep asking who I need to talk to about that. I suspect that AotR and perhaps some other of the non-profits in this area could participate in a mutually beneficial arrangement w/ Freenet that would help a) fund the NOC, and b) provide a locally hosted internet presence to businesses and organizations in this area at "cost" - I.E. Something less than what they are paying now. I really believe this is a very practical and workable idea, but up until this point, I have been working from a distance, and haven't been able to get any email discussion of it off the ground - probably because [I suspect] I have been largely unknown to the principles in what has been done downtown so far... I hope to rectify that problem ASAP. ... > > So, my broader question still remains. If you could start over, > > and do something even bigger but took much less money and ongoing > > maintenance... how would you do it? I want to get back to that question again in another email... > > > > General ideas: > > > > 1. Better community. > > > > The project's staffing level sucks because CHAOS went dormant. > > Our LUG meetings used to enjoy a pretty large turn-out (for > > Columbus) at least once in a while, and the wireless project was > > basically just a follow-on thing for the CHAOSers to play with. > > When was the last time Columbus geeks plastered CSU and Columbus > > Tech with CHAOS-meeting posters? :) I think this is very important, and I am right now in a position to address these kinds of things - I.E. I can make the posters and distribute them - in fact, I'm looking for excuses to do that sort of thing. I am also talking to a lot of business owners in Columbus and Phenix City about various networking and internet presence issues. It would be very helpful if I could "back up my bullshit" regarding the Downtown WiFi network with some facts and figures. I would very much like to meet with anyone who is still involved in this project ASAP. > > It's hard getting interesting speakers that appeal to a lot of > > people, but in all honesty the regular meet-up at the coffee shop > > was probably more popular anyway. So just advertise that :) Is the regular meetup still going on? If not, how much trouble is it going to be to get it back on the calendar(s)? > I agree, CHAOS needs to be resurreccted. CFN alone keeps me pretty > busy. Any takers on the CHAOS group? I can help some but someone > else needs to take the helm. I'll take it. I'm not entirely clear on the difference between CFN and CHAOS, though. Is CFN a function of CHAOS? > > > > What if you had to design another CFn that scaled to ten blocks. Actually, one of the things I've been trying drum up some interest in is the extension of the Freenet into Midtown, Phenix City, and - ultimately - I think wireless backhaul links to Auburn/Opelika, LaGrange, and Atlanta are all doable. I do expect some backlash from the heavyweights in the telcos and cable companies, though, since once you put VoIP on this links, Verizon can be expected to come after it "loaded for bear". Sound like fun? The publicity generated by the Verizon/SBC lawsuit would go national, at least ... or I might just disappear into the Chatahoochee mud... > Could > > you re-work the implementation to be cheaper, say, with an adaptive > > mesh that would use multiple egress points to the Internet? Redundant backhaul networks, yes. And yes, could do that, and cheaper, I'm quite certain. I'm just not sure how quick the telcos are going to be to shut it down when they realize their bandwidth is being remarket-ed at a cost that is below what they themselves are reaming the consumers with. I dipped into this problem just slightly regarding Sprint's EVDO service - there is a lot more to this and I'm not going to write a book about it, here, but I definitely want to talk to the remaining Freenet people about it, since I want to use the existing Freenet infrastructure as a base network to build out from. > > Bandwidth isn't a problem now, thanks to Knology, but if you were > > to scale to an area 10x as large, it wouldn't be enough. This problem has been "successfully" addressed in a couple areas, so it is known to be "doable." In SW Michigan (Grand Rapids area), we were going to network a residential neighborhood by placing backhaul links on each block (e.g. a cable modem), then covering each block w/ WiFi. If you think of each block as a "cell" [in the sense of a "cellular" network] it quickly becomes evident that the problem is very similar to cellular phone networks, but using IP routing for data as opposed to whatever sort of routing it is they use for cell phone voice traffic. Again, that means the theory of the problem is well understood, all that remains is to build the implmentation - and I'm sure there are people on the west coast who have already started with that, as well. If I understand it correctly, the way the phone company did T1 "back in the day" was to link each T1 termination location to two other T1 sites. For the "block-oriented" model, I postulate that for each block there be one direct back-haul link, and [minimally] two wired links to neighboring "blocks". The use of a dynamic routing protocol would allow dynamic routing in the event of a site going offline for whatever reason... This is basic TCP/IP networking, so I won't belabour it, since I'm guessing you get the idea? > > A smart mesh with clever > > routing might allow you to take advantage of random business' > > cable/dsl connections (with blessing from the owners, of course.) A > > LOLphtless freenet, if you will. Organic to the existing grid. Yes. > > We all talked about that in the beginning, but that sort of thing > > was really beyond our ability three years ago... but everyone's > > learned a lot since then. Naturally, you probably don't have time > > to do it unless you get more folks (see #1). Well, I was working on it 3 years ago, but not here, and the amount of progress I made with it was severely limited by the fact that I could not even raise any interest in the idea - mostly because nobody seemed to be able to understand WtF I was talking about. Someone pointed me at CHAOS as a group of people who were think/working along similar lines, but I was never able to make it to a meeting. And I still don't understand why there never seemed to any video-conferencing available for the meetings? Web-cams are /cheap/, after all... even 3 years ago. > Currently the model we have been working with is building a base of > customers who have their own egress points. Gymnastics Unlimited is > one example. We of course reccomend Knology to customers because of > the great support they have given ColumbusFreenet. By doing this we > can get funds for hardware and implement the node. > > This model is important because it has removed our need for the NOC. > The second step would be to fill in gaps by meshing the nodes > together off of the connections in the area. This is good, but I would suggest that rather than do away with the NOC, that the NOC be re-tasked into a "profit center" for doing things like domain hosting, perhaps even application hosting for network customers. Simple stuff like hosting of an online data backup capability for local customers [those on the network inside the firewalls] or email servers can generate income that can cover costs of things like disc storage, power consumption, and so on. > Sam and I both didn't like WDS > protocol since the support across different hardware is flakey at > best. We were playing around with OLSR but never put anything into > production. I would like to talk to you about this, and maybe take a look at what's already in operation. Possible? > Some may wonder why a business would not just put up their own access > point (like Country's on Broadway) and be done with it. > > My pitch on that is this: > > 1: Freenet offers a better way which includes firewalling your > network > from the wireless users. This is important for businesses that also > use their connection to send card transaction information or have a > network of their own that they don't want left exposed. > > 2: We can enable an authorization process in which users must provide > a valid email address and validate the address by responding to an > email sent to that account for verification. This way we have > "registered" users and they can use their login ID at any of the > ColumbusFreenet nodes so they only have to sign-up once. > > 3: We can offer statistics of usage using a number of categories > including usage by MAC (yes this can be spoofed of course). And, if > necessary we can block MAC addresses and users across the entire > network. Of course this is lightweight blocking. > > 4: We use OpenDNS and can set up content filtering if desired. (This > one is a littlebit up in the air because of censorship/liability) > Anyone know a good lawyer willing to write a release form that we can > use? If you start doing content filtering at the DNS, then you're on very dicey legal ground, I think. China has a reputation for doing that. You might want to do something like set up PGP authentication for DNS zone file transfers in such a way that the customer can filter their own DNS resolutions without impacting the rest of the network. I think filtering the entire net is a very bad idea - doable, but morally reprehensible, and anti-American. > 5: We can enable banners across the entire network. If you, the > customer, would like to advertise in this space we can provide a > banner that Freenet users in other locations can see when they log > in. > > > We did pretty well getting the local businesses to fork over cash > > for the access points, but we never had a great solution for > > remaining costs... aside from donations. Our fund raisers were fun, > > but not very lucrative. > > Agreed. I am still amazed at the amount of support, funds, and > equipment you were able to get in the early days! > > > > I think a free-market approach would be > > better. But, it's not an easy problem to solve. > > Free-market! You seem to forget CFn is still in Columbus. :P The > city govt. didn't even show up for the statewide video conference > at the Georgia Technical Authority which was in the process of > handing out 4 million dollars earmarked by Gov. Perdue specifically > for community wifi It is (imo) symptomatic of the problem, here that this mention of Perdue's program is the very first I've heard of it. $4,000,000 should be enough to network all of Georgia outside of Atlanta w/ WiFi. .... Okay, that might be a slight exageration, but I'm fairly certain for even a small fraction of that I could cover all of Muscogee County, complete with outlinks to the surrounding counties. Furthermore, I probably could have gotten Columbus Consolidated Govt to show up for the video conference /if I had known about it/. This is the sort of thing I was talking about earlier when I said "marketing". I'm subscribed to the damn email list, and listed on the Wiki, but I knew nothing of this video-conference or $4M ear-mark until this moment... > > In case this all comes off as negative criticism or something, I > want > > to emphasize that it's anything but! > > Not taken as negative criticism here. Well, I know I'm probably coming off pretty critical, so let me just go on record as saying you guys suck at internet communications. The NOC, the WiFi, and all that is GREAT, but I've yet [in 3 years] to get the first "serious" email from any of you regarding either things I was proposing, or things you were actually doing, and I had actually given up trying to get through well before I found myself back on Broadway a couple weeks ago... So quit being such a clique, eh? I mean that in a friendly way, of course, and I will add the caveat that your net communications skills (email, etc) don't seem to be much worse than the majority of the corporate clients I have had to deal with - I just expected better - which means I set myself up for disappointment since [obviously] one should never have expectations unless one is prepared to deal with the inevitable disappointment that is sure to follow... > > Again, the real goal of the > > project was to bring a lot of people together to do something > > relatively constructive, and have everybody walk away a little > > smarter than when they showed up. I think we accomplished that > > pretty well. Yes. So I hope my criticism will not be taken too much to heart... > Agreed, no if we can just get that part going again! I think there > are lots of people who would love to do this but time and even more > difficult a "common" time available is hard to come by. Wednesday night at The Loft (or somewhere nearby). > > (PS, somebody should start the LUG thing going again!) > > I think the LUG needs to be revitalized regardless of > ColumbusFreenet's existance! So there are other Linux users around here? I've not met any - here or elsewhere - since I left Michigan in '05. I was under the impression Linux was a dead issue since Comcast and Mediacom started prohibiting it in their user agreements.... > Oh.. and by the way.. if anyone needs yet another project to help > with...... > > Contact: Hank at the Cannon Brew Pub. He is officially starting a > non-profit Bio-Diesel (or Bio-Fuel) organization. Production should > start soon. :) Cool. I will try to get by there next week to talk to him. I've been trying to find someone to help me with a bio-diesel power generation system I've been trying to build. Is anyone growing the crops to feed the bio-diesel production, or are we going to have to buy soybeans from Monsanto at obscenely inflated rates...? [that's a rhetorical question, btw]. So when is the next CHAOS/LUG/CFn meet, and who is going to show up? 0x0000 --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "CHAOS706.ORG" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/chaos706?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
