On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 7:31 PM, Russell Senior <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > 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.
I'm shocked (and maybe relieved) that the total is that low. How many have had their NuCabs replaced with a WRT/WGT or just been downgraded to an AP going into the DSL modem? > 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. They are sleek, as well. > 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. I think raising donations is a good idea, I don't think that seeking a grant specifically to replace nucabs is a good idea. Here's why: Foundations want to make gifts that expand organizations, they don't want to be ongoing supporters. The nucabs were initially received as donations. In that sense, they allowed PTP to build the organization by giving us hardware that allowed us to handle routing, displaying the captive portal, remote maintenance, etc. That is now a part of PTP, and PTP is responsible for maintaining that infrastructure, which includes replacing it as necessary with newer/better hardware. Seeking a grant to cover the replacement suggests that we are not financially sustainable and also means that we'd burn a grant opportunity on something that we can and should fund ourselves. If, however, by replacing the nucabs with the alix devices we were also able to build our volunteer capacity, or introduce new outreach efforts, it would make sense to seek foundation funding, because that would represent an expansion of PTP's efforts. I feel like this may exist, but I can't really place my finger on it. > 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: I don't think they should be unplugged or allowed to rot. But I do think the onus is on PTP and not a generous foundation to replace them. They have served many thousands of people over the years, so there are many beneficiaries who might be receptive to a request for help. PTP is about the community and it's time we asked the community to do their part. A reasonable goal might be 50% of the replacement cost from new donations. -- Michael Weinberg President Personal Telco Project, Inc. A 501(c)(3) Non-Profit --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ The Personal Telco Project - http://www.personaltelco.net/ Donate to PTP: http://www.personaltelco.net/donate Archives: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.network.wireless.portland.general/ Etiquette: http://www.personaltelco.net/index.cgi/MailingListEtiquette List information: http://lists.personaltelco.net To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
