Mississippi Network Diagram and Configuration

December 19, 2020: Having debugged some of the problems, and returning with an ethernet tester that reports distance to fault, reinstalled the bullet ac, and strung a new ethernet run (58 feet). Left the 12V power supply in place, which works for the bullet ac, but not for the unifi-ac-mesh which needs 24V. So far, it is looking excellent, with a booming signal at both ends of the 5GHz link. The Ballroom roof is next up for upgrades. JasonBergstrom, TomasKuchta and RussellSenior participating.

December 12, 2020: Quick visit to swap out the bullet m5 for a bullet ac, however multiple failures and running out of daylight led to an abort with a regression (the ethernet run which was working when we arrived was not working when we left). JasonBergstrom, TomasKuchta, TedBrunner and RussellSenior participating.

December 9, 2020: Replaced metrix-commons with a ubiquiti rocket m5 and an dual polarity omni antenna. Replaced the ubiquiti loco m9 with a unifi-ac-mesh for local coverage. Replaced both power supplies in the telco closet. The m9 pair, left over from the link with the grand central roof might be redeployed to reinforce the link from commons to the ballroom. RussellSenior did all this work.

November 29, 2020: The new gateway device, currently numbered 10.11.104.20, consisting of a Ubiquiti ER-X, was connected to the Internet. We are currently seeing weak reception at metrix-commons from the new bullet m5, and also seeing some out-of-memory induced reboots. Currently plan to return with a new Ubiquiti Bullet AC in mid-December to replace the struggingly bullet m5hp. --RussellSenior

November 21, 2020: Installed a new device, currently numbered 10.11.104.19, consisting of a Ubiquiti Bullet M5HP, in the alley behind Mississippi Commons, pointing at the antennas of metrix-commons. This is to be connected to a new higher bandwidth gateway on the premises of the host. Installation was made by JasonBergstrom, TedBrunner, TomasKuchta and RussellSenior, with Tomas doing the ladder climbing, and TedBrunner doing the ladder transporting.

May 23, 2015: Decommissioned our equipment from the roof the the Grand Central Baking building. This provided the internet connection to the rest of the network. Reconfigured the network at NodeFreshPot to provide an alternative gateway. --RussellSenior

July 2, 2014: Visited the Mississippi Ballroom building, inspecting our equipment on the roof, trying to assess how to improve the backhaul link to Mississippi Commons.

May 6, 2014: After a couple month outage, NodeEd (4135 N Mississippi), service was restored this evening to the northern most part of the network, thanks to the generous and moderately risky efforts of our volunteer crew: EdHan, GustavSwanson, ConnorScott, JasonBergstrom, JorenLove, RussellSenior, and MatthewKlug. There were scheduling problems around getting people and cooperative weather lined up simultaneously. But tonight, in just a few hours, we pulled it all together. The same Metrix box on the same mast was reinstalled. A new ethernet connector and cat6 cable run into the house was installed, with new chimney straps on a new chimney. Hopefully, will be good for another 8 years. Meanwhile, the Ballroom roof is still having trouble. I was hopeful that tonights reinstallation would provide a path back to the gateway for Ballroom, but since we our aim improved to the desired target (Commons), it got worse for Ballroom. So, the Ballroom roof is still needing some kind of solution. --RussellSenior

December 30, 2013: There was another outage yesterday (until about 9am this morning). A few weeks ago, I had installed a UPS on the wall to try to isolate our gear from any building power issues. This time I replaced the Alix2 and all of the power supplies. The NanoStation2 is on a surge-suppression-only power outlet, the others should have some battery backup, possibly for a long time due to the small load we are placing on them. I also replaced the silly wooden shelf device we had there with a simple board on which the Alix2 is mounted using one of our newly acquired wallmount kits, and the three PoE injectors. They are labelled as well. We'll continue to watch this network for misbehavior. --RussellSenior

December 6, 2013: There was an unexplained outage of silt, the alix2 gateway device, at about 4:30pm. I noticed about two hours later, managed to get into the building and check on it. I attached a serial console, got no response, and rebooted it. Came back up fine. No idea why, which is annoying, since it could happen again. I am going to guess it was a power blip of some kind. The electricity there has lots of motor loads for their HVAC equipment. We lost an alix there this year when it stopped talking to its CF card, maybe also related to power. --RussellSenior

January 31, 2013: Updated the alix2 gateway device to OpenWrt r35318 with linux kernel 3.7.4 and IPv6. Client devices can now take advantage of IPv6 connectivity! --RussellSenior

January 29, 2012: Replaced an access point and eventually (today) a wall-wart power supply, the latter fixing the problem, in the laundryroom at the Mississippi Ballroom building. This was a peculiar case, the access point was probably just fine, but for some reason it was not able to supply enough power to *received* data. It came up fine without apparent errors, it beaconed so that clients could see the network, however it was not possible to associate with it. Replacing the power supply fixed the problem. Thanks to ColinFrey for reporting the problem. --RussellSenior

June 28, 2011: We are seeing packet loss on the point-to-point link between the Ubiquiti PowerStation2's on Mississippi Commons and the Grand Central Baking roof. Both ends report (via the LED indicators) solid signal strength. It isn't clear what is causing the packet loss. There is heavy tree folliage in the path. We (DanRasmussen and RussellSenior) noticed that the mast on Ed Han's roof had slipped a bit. It looks like the upper two courses of bricks have moved. This would be consistent with a sudden change in signal strength that we saw back in February. Ed has been alerted. --RussellSenior

May 30, 2011: After good experience elsewhere, reflashed the 4 remaining metrix boxes with OpenWrt r27000 and batman-adv, replacing the old Metrix Pyramid + WDS configuration we flashed on them in June of 2007. Thanks Metrix Pyramid. Long live Openwrt + batman-adv! --RussellSenior

April 2, 2010: A power-outage induced downtime. Sometime about 1 p.m., a power outage caused the devices at the bakery (including the gateway device) and commons to drop. The devices on the bakery roof recovered, but apparently, as a result of this power interruption, our metrix on the commons roof got stuck. This was particularly bad because it acts as the primary relay point for the roof-to-roof network. This outage was not noticed for several hours, until late evening. I drove over about 11:30 p.m., got into the building and the telephone closet and power-cycled the metrix, after which the network returned to normal function. --RussellSenior

January 28, 2010: Plugged in two new indoor access points in the Mississippi Ballrooom building, one in the laundry room and the other in the retail space downstairs. Both are Linksys WRT54Gv2's with OpenWrt 8.09.2. I have bridged all the ethernet ports together so that it doesn't matter which is plugged in. The ethernet for downstairs is run on two unused pairs left in the light-blue cat5 run down there. This was to solve the problem of people inside the Ballroom building having not such good connections, when a bunch of gear was on their roof and not helping them out so much. I gave the indoor APs unique SSIDs (www.personaltelco.net/street and www.personaltelco.net/laundry) to help out with users figuring out what they are connected to. Both are on channel 6 for the time being. We should do a more comprehensive site survey to maybe optimize channel utilization. --RussellSenior

August 11, 2009: RussellSenior met Shawn from Stephouse today at the Grand Central Baking building and installed a CPE to connect to Stephouse Wireless for an internet connection, replacing the Covad/Stephouse DSL that we've been using since the Mississippi Network launched way back in 2005. The old gateway nucab in the Ballroom building has been unplugged along with the DSL modem. The primary regression is that we no longer have multiple public IPs and that (temporarily, at least) we don't have port forwards set up to reach the network directly (we have to go in through the VPN). The port forwards should be set up soon by Stephouse. Some other cleanup is needed as well. --RussellSenior

August 7, 2009: SaraHonsberger, RussellSenior, TylerBooth, JorenLove and ChristopherChen worked on improving the link to the bakery roof, so that the rest of the network can be served via a new wireless Internet connection through Stephouse. The old DSL is due to go away in the near future. The installation on the bakery roof was completely revamped. With a Ubiquity PowerStation2 (Stephouse) was installed to link through the trees to the Commons, and a Ubiquity NanoStation2 (Russell) was installed to provide local coverage. Our power had been cut off when the tenant downstairs whose HVAC unit we were sponging off of moved out and turned off their electricity, so we moved the power injection inside to the warehouse space near the bottom of the upper ladder. In the near future, Tyler will provide a CPE to connect to their network and we will install an AlixCab to act as a gateway. On the Commons roof, we revitalized the second cat5 run to the roof, installed the proper PoE injector, and installed a PowerStation2 (Stephouse) to link to the bakery roof. With rough aiming, we achieved 4 bars and a pretty solid connection of about 10Mbps. Retired to Amnesia to celebrate. --RussellSenior

November 16, 2008: Visited the house of EricMessersmith and retrieved the Netgear WGT634U there that had been serving as the access point for the repeater there. Eric's roof-mounted omni directional antenna connects to the outdoor 802.11g network by way of a PTP-owned Buffalo WHR-G54S in client mode. The Netgear connects to the Buffalo and provides local access. Upon examination back on the bench, it appears the Netgear was physically and electrically sound, but that (guessing) someone had made the mistake of plugging the ethernet cable into the WAN port (we frequently want to use the LAN ports in cases like this so that they bridge rather than route). I took the opportunity to update the version of OpenWrt flashed on the Netgear, bridged eth0.1, eth0.0 and ath0 together, so that it won't matter which port the ethernet is connected to. Also set up dnsmasq on the Buffalo to hand the Netgear a particular address (192.168.3.2 or 192.168.3.3, depending on which mac address the bridge gets) using /etc/ethers. The Netgear is configured to get an address from DHCP. It is buttoned up and ready to plug back in, hopefully in the next day or two. --RussellSenior

October 22, 2008: Sometime about 2:30 a.m. today the uninterruptible power supply in the laundryroom of the Ballroom Building interrupted itself. When I got here, a little after noon, the SmartUPS600 was not responding to applied permutations. As a result, I temporarily bypassed the UPS and went to find another one. A bit after 2pm, I returned from Office Depot with a replacement, an APC Backup 900. It is now plugged in and working, as far as I can tell. Hopefully, this one will give us years of good service as the previous one did. --RussellSenior

October 17, 2008: At about 8pm this evening, someone disconnected several of the ethernet cables from the switch in the laundryroom of the Ballroom Building, knocking most of the network off the air. I plugged them back in and left a note asking that people please not disturb the network and to please contact me in the event of trouble. Also, that bittorrent and other p2p applications on the network were not appropriate, because they interfere with the ability for others to use the network. When found to be interfering, the party involved will be blocked until we can discuss the situation. --RussellSenior

October 8, 2008: Visited the roof of the Grand Central Baking building to reset the metrix and also to retrieve the unused WiMax CPE and antenna that belongs to StephouseNetworks. Noticed that there is now an avenue for penetrating the roof. We could, if we wished, remove the enclosure for our PoE switch and move it inside near an AC outlet. This could allow us to provide a better access point for indoor coverage as well. We should perhaps suggest that to the building owners. --RussellSenior

March 13, 2008: Replaced the fourth WgtRepeater with a Ruckus DZ today at Moloko Plus. Previously replaced WgtRepeater devices in the last month or so were at Amnesia, Muddy's and a residential location northeast of the Ballroom building. Should be a substantial improvement at Moloko Plus. --RussellSenior

January 31, 2008: Today, we received and I deposited the restitution funds ordered by the Multnomah County Circuit Court in the case of the MissNet vandalism. It was not particularly expected. I had just been wondering if we would ever see a dime of the money, and found the registered letter 2 minutes later in our post office box. --RussellSenior

January 30, 2008: MichaelWeinberg and RussellSenior visited Mississippi Commons to correct a problem with the ethernet run between the rooftop metrix and the wiring closet. We had power just fine but according to graphs, about mid-December the network connectivity to the wiring closet went away. We found that the Soekris board was fine, but we had an issue with the cable run. We eventually tracked the problem back to a mid-run coupling (keystone to tip connection) near the conduit inside the wiring closet. We fixed that up and everything started working again. In the process, we discovered that the access point in Salty's Dog Shop had disappeared. Michael left a note inquiring about that. Also recently we have upgraded two of the wgt repeaters to Ruckus DZ devices, one northeast of the Ballroom and the other in Muddy's Coffee. It is possible that we now have coverage in Mississippi Pizza, though that is unconfirmed at the moment. --RussellSenior

November 10, 2007: On an unexpectedly nice day, RussellSenior, SaraHonsberger and PaulCLeddy got on the GrandCentralBaking roof and fitted our mast there with some guywires to reduce the swaying and swaying-induced "thunking". Hopefully, that will mitigate the noise the tenants downstairs have been experiencing. Should check in with them in a few weeks to confirm. Paul and Russell also climbed on the Commons roof and Paul got briefed on the gear we have there. We also bumped into someone at MississippiPizza that informed us that the BoiseVoice article had run. We hope to: a) get a copy; and b) begin receiving feedback from residents. --RussellSenior

When applicable, the person that has assumed the task is noted after it (in parentheses).

• Retrieve WiMax gear from Grand Central Baking roof

• Write up a proposal for TramelCrowResidential regarding what we'd like to put on their roof.

• Solve the Commons-to-Bakery link problem somehow. Summer time leaves are killing the signal.

• Continue investigation of the potential new roof at Beech & Borthwick

• Follow up on Mississippi Lofts roof
• Keep alert for potential for more bandwidth, network is saturating on a daily basis.