LuckyLab : 30th January 2002
Next Meeting: MeetingFebruary2002

Thanks to everyone who attended the January meeting, and a special thanks to Jim Binkley for his presentation on MobileIp. In case you missed it, his website can be found at http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~jrb/.

Feel free to add and edit these notes as many ears make a better listener!

Scribes: ChristianSeppa and SamChurchill

Focus Meeting

General Meeting

The location, date and time of the next meeting is always available on the MonthlyMeeting page. We also have archives of the MeetingNotes from all past meetings.

Sam's Clif Notes

Sam Churchill, here. I took notes and pictures at the meeting and will post them here soon. As Adam notes, Jim Binkley described characteristics of Mobile IP. Here's a bit more about Clif Cox.

Clif Cox, who founded the Eugene Free Network, displayed his $2000 Pelican Brief: a Cisco AP with POE injector, 1 watt amp, a timeout mechanism and other goodies stashed in a Pelican case. It looked similar to the pole-mounted units that Matt Peterson has created.

Clif lives in Eugene and has been involved in the Eugene Country Fair, for many years. About four years ago he "unwired" it with Richochet radios. He found a nearby farm house who was willing to share their phone and relayed the signal to the Country Fair bouncing off four radios with two radios in trees. A laptop would have two serial connectors (PC card serial adapters provided a second port)relayed the signal. The wireless network used the STRIP protocol from the MosquitoNet project.

About three years ago he teamed with John Gilmore, the cypherpunk co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who paid for the satellite dish and service from Tachyon. John also wrote the book on Cracking DES. The 2-way satellite link can provide 256K up nearly anywhere. About 3 years ago they used in at Country Fair and it has been a backbone at Burning Man the last few years. The satellite runs at 2 Mbit/sec downstream and 300 Kbit/sec upstream. PlayaNet's wireless network runs at 1 to 11 megabits/sec and covers the entire Playa area.

Cliff is soon leaving the country to provide wireless service to Bhutan, about 60 miles east of Nepal. The Bhutan government wants to provide communications services in outlying areas so they are setting up point-to-point telecommuncations towers, linked via 802.11b and 2-way satellite dishes. I'm not sure whether the Tachyon will be used for the Bhutan uplink or not.

Clif showed some SpectraLink and Symbol phones they will be using for Voice over IP. These are cordless phones that use 802.11b. Both Proxim and Symbol make them. Frequency hopping phones are also available but the best use H.323 protocols and DSSS.

Clif took me outside and showed me his car which was hotter than anything at the Portland Auto Show. He had a 2-way Tachyon satellite system in the back seat. The dish was so oval it looked like a surfboard. I'm stoked.

How about FlightLinux for IP in Space! The University of Surry launched with first webserver in space in January, 2001 with U/O Sat 12. OMNI follows up in 2002. Disco nation!

http://www.azinet.com/starshine/twosat4.gif

Photos and more later. - Sam Churchill

PS: Reason number 42 to dislike Windows. I downloaded 6, (six!) photos to my antique Celeron machine that had a hard drive filled to capacity. The photos wrote right over the OS and that was the end of my photos. And pretty much everything else. I eventually got the machine working but what a pain. I'm a point and click kind of guy but I'm beginning to warm up to The Linux Way. But forget the photos. They're gone for good.

Next: MeetingFebruary2002


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