NewbieWorkshop02 - Personal Telco Project

Please read the NewbieWorkshop page for the whys, whos, wheres and further general detail on this event.

Location: House of TomHiggins BR

2924 SE Alder St Portland ORBR

Date: 02/23/03 BR Planned Start Time: 12 Noon BR Actual Start Time: 12 Noon BR Wrap Up Time: 6:00 pmBR Role call:TomHiggins Alex Trent SamChurchill Ray Bert memorylapse

Pictures:BR

http://wsmf.org/pictures/2003/0223-PTPWorkshop/

Agenda: BR

Meet and Greet / Setup BR
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Demos and Projects BR
DWL-800ap+
Netstumbler
Fun With XP
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Questions and Answers BR
A good gathering with about 5 full hours of talk, help and ideas. Lots of ground was covered.
We started off mucking with Windows XP. Note Bene, if xp tries to turn on bridging between your network interfaces, slap it down. Head over to your network setup and delete the Network Bridge item. This will free up your NICs, the wirelss one should be set to grab a dhcp.
Cards dealt with Orinocos, Linksys, Siemens SpeedStreams,
Lots of questions about where things stand with PTPs aims. Talk of MANs really got folks talking. Phase one, set up hotspots, phase two, tie em together.
- Talk about schools and community centers. Given the state of the state getting some sort of value added boxes with wifi into these places seems a great way to get good pr and more nodes.
Some good use of netstumbler. Used it to see how each others cards were behaving as well as to test out Berts cool Dlink Repeater/AP
Freegeek came up as a unisys " clonearmy " box was passed around. It is cheaper than many solutions, but the moving parts will make it a no sell to the solid staters, this WAS the setup some time ago but tech has moved up the bar. Still its a good cheap alternative.
The zine issue was raised again as something needed to be able to get the word out, status on the completion of the first issue was given, that being the last month was a total washout for working on it. Contributions of articles, specificaly dealing with 101 level issues, is much needed.
- Ideas for including a cd with the zine were tossed around.
How much of the city could be covered for 50k$. Given the numbers tossed around when talking of grants and other funding 50k seems a lowball number. Even boosting the cost of the box, runing it for a year and some over head 1K per box sounded like a good number. Would 50 well placed nodes give the PTP the snowball effect needed to then bootstrap the grassroots coverage. Who is any good at grant writting?
BR

Next meeting:March 2003 (tdb) NewbieWorkshop03 BR Topic: BR BR BR

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