The recent Y2K non-event gave me the impetus to finish a project I'd been working on for a few months, and it's something that others on this list who are involved in public service activities might be interested in. I've put together what I call a "network in a bag" for emergency use. It's an old laptop (486SX/50, 16MB RAM, 250MB disk) with PCMCIA modem and ethernet cards, long telephone cable, an ethernet mini-hub, and a bunch of network drop cables. The laptop has Linux installed and ppp configured to dial in to my home network, which then provides access to the Internet (others might use a separate ISP account, hopefully with a static IP address). The kernel is configured for IP masquerade and the dhcpd daemon is running to provide a class C network on the ethernet side. The laptop has apache, sendmail, and samba installed as well. With this setup, in about 10 minutes I can network a bunch of Windows PCs and provide them Internet access as well as a local mail server and file/print sharing via Samba. The web server allows public access to status information if that becomes necessary. At the moment, I don't have AX.25 configured, but that's the next step. The only problem I forsee is that my laptop doesn't have 16550 UARTs on its serial ports, and both PCMCIA slots are being used, so high-speed access may be a problem. But a 1200 baud radio link into an internet-connected convers server would still be a useful tool. It turns out we didn't need this for Y2K (thankfully) but it seemed to impress the folks in the war room where I was stationed. Just something to think about... 73, John N8UR [EMAIL PROTECTED]
