On Sunday afternoon, I was alerted that we had problems at our
LuckyLab node on SE Hawthorne. In working to get it up and running
again, we encountered a problem of growing significance.
About 30 of our nodes use the old nucab boxes as routers/captive
portals. These were built out of donated PCs and installed years ago.
They are bulky, make noise, use energy and occasionally fail, but the
bigger problem now is that they were often built with a partitioning
scheme that will no longer allow the operating system software to be
updated without substantial gyrations. To upgrade them would be very
labor intensive, during a time when available Personal Telco volunteer
hours are very limited.
An alternative to the nucabs which is much smaller, uses much less
electricity (about 5 or 6 Watts), is fanless so it makes no noise, and
is actually faster and has more RAM, is the Alix.2d3 board that I have
been bringing to recent meetings. It has three ethernet ports, which
is enough for any PTP node application that I know of. It even does
passive Power over Ethernet. They are more than powerful enough to
run our old familiar NoCatAuth captive portal.
I put one of these together as an experiment and used it at the One
Web Day event in September and it worked great. There would be a
little more work involved in developing the software to go onto the
devices, but that work would amortize across the whole deployment.
This afternoon, I priced out what it would cost to purchase the
hardware for 30 of these, to completely replace the old nucabs. The
total is (assuming $20 per 1GB CompactFlash card) $5200. That
includes the Alix 2D3 board, an indoor enclosure, a 15V switching
power supply, a passive PoE injector and the CompactFlash card. That
comes out to $173 per device. Personal Telco has some cash, but not
enough to cover that cost. A substantial fraction of it would need to
be raised from donations, grants or some other fund-raising scheme.
There is an argument that we don't need the nucab or any replacement,
that if the nucabs are becoming unmaintainable, we should just unplug
the nucab and use a plain wireless router. I think the nucab and/or
its replacement does serve several useful functions:
a) it allows for a captive portal, which in turn:
1) allows us to communicate with node users;
2) lets the node host claim credit for hosting the node;
3) it allows us to track the amount of usage, to help understand
how well our nodes are serving the community.
b) it allows for remote debugging and administration of nodes, which
reduces the time lag involved in waiting for problem reports to
filter back and the volunteer time to visit the node to
diagnose. Having a nucab or alternative present reduces the
maintenance burden.
c) it allows for network abusers to be identified and blocked
individually rather than en-mass.
d) it allows the construction of vpn tunnels that allow remote
administration even through non-cooperative upstream nat'ing
gateways.
It might be possible in some instances to replace the nucabs with
something cheaper than an alix, such as one of our Netgear WGT634U.
That is true, however:
a) some problems have been reported with the wifidog captive portal
we've used with the WGT.
b) the WGT is not as robust in extremes of temperature and usage as
the Alix
c) The WGT probably does not have the processing power to handle vpn
tunnels so well.
In review, the existing nucab infrastructure is rotting. Few people
know how to fix them. We can no longer keep their software upgraded
as we have in the past. It is just a matter of time until they start
to fail in a manner that is impractical to fix. It seems to me that
now is the time to think about how to replace them, and that the Alix
looks like a nice way to do that.
Thoughts? Comments?
--
Russell Senior, Secretary
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