Welcome to the unofficial Acton/Westford Personal Telco Home Page

In the immediate area, the towns of Acton and Westford, there are currently four registered nodes, each within about 4 miles of each other. We need more nodes!

There are several several more nodes closer in to Boston, all members of the Boston Area Wireless Interest Association (BAWIA) http://www.bawia.org

Here's some map links showing proposed (orange), currently inactive (black), and active nodes our area. There's a link on these pages for registering your location as an interested or active node.

Please take time to register your location. We'd like you to join us.

• ==== Metro Boston - North of the Pike ====

• http://maps.personaltelco.net/node_map_choose?protocol=&status=&scale=0.0104&lat=42.5&lon=-71.2 ==== Metro Boston - South of the Pike ====

• http://maps.personaltelco.net/node_map_choose?protocol=&status=&scale=0.0104&lat=42.2&lon=-71.3

If you got to this page from outside, the home page for the Personal Telco Project is http://www.personaltelco.net

I'm personally running with a Cisco 350 card, A Hewlett Packard Omnibook Computer running Linux (Red Hat 7.2 at the moment). No AP yet but that's coming soon.

Here's some of the issues I'm working on with other members of bawia:

• ==== How to do Configuration - /proc/driver/aironet/eth0/Config ====
• This is where configuration data is set for the Aironet card.
• What configuration data can be set? What can't be set?
• Does any configuration data get set in the card itself? How does that happen? Is it volatile or does it remain if you shut the card off and turn it back on again.
• What does that data do?
• What are ALL the options?
• Where's it documented?
• you set modes in /proc/driver/aironet/eth0/Config. Does that store information on the card itself or just store things in the kernel?
• What's the mechanism for getting information back and forth between the card and /proc/driver/aironet/eth0/Config. Is that the work of the driver?
• setting the configuration in /proc can be done using shell commands. I'm currently doing the configuration on the laptop manually by entering the ifconfig, route and iwconfig commands in a term window. How do you set things up so this happens automatically at boot time or at the time you insert the Aironet card. ==== Operating the card as a device ====
• How do you reset the Aironet 350 card to "factory settings"
• What channel do the cards operate on by default
• Does the card change channels automatically under certain conditions?
• Can the card be forced to work on a particular channel? ==== Operating without an Access Point ====
• How do you get two aironet cards to talk to each other without an Access Point? I may have misunderstood but I think someone said you can't do that with Aironet cards - I don't believe it. ==== Diagnosing Problems ====
• When an AP and a card won't communicate, what's the order of things to check? ==== Interoperbility ====
• Some cards are known to have interoperability problems. Which ones do, Which don't.
• Where do we find solutions for specific cards
• How are solutions developed?
• What's really impossible?
• What's merely troublesome because you haven't found the right information? ==== Network Detection and Monitoring ====
• What open source tools for network detection and monitoring are there and what are the pre-requisite packages and versions for getting them built and running.
• I've built and installed etherreal but we couldn't get it working on the wireless interface, maybe because we had some configuration work still to do. There may be something to do to etherreal's build to get it to work with wireless.
• I need to learn how etherreal works at the tcp/ip level at the level of the interface, and at the mac level.For that matter, I need to learn what really goes on at each of these levels.

Some of these questions will be covered by Howtos and FAQ's I haven't read yet. Feel free to point them out.

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