Friday July 8th night, I talked to a summer student, Erik. He owns a Linksys WRT54G and lent it to me for use in setting kludgenet. I went to Ryan and he lent a switch, network card, computer, and cable. We tried to setup the router and get it to talk to his apple airport access point. But being apple, it refused to talk directly to the router (be a client) and talk on its network port at the same time. I went to sleep. Saturday, observing Jeremy's pentium 3 computer with wireless card, I eventually found Jeremy. He installed FreeBSD on the box and I installed gentoo on a crufty pentium 2 300 found in Dabney courtyard more than a year ago.
We setup a wireless network in Avery with paranoid restrictions. On the access point itself we turned off ssid broadcast, set it to mac filter, and turned off WEP (more on this later). The linux box talked to ITS on the cheap 10/100 card that came with it, one I did not mind throwing out with an unregistered MAC address. External IP was 131.215.159.116, assigned by DHCP. Ryan's card talked to the wireless router using IP 192.168.1.100. Jeremy's FreeBSD box used 192.168.1.101 . In Avery the communication was unreliable.
Amos, a grad student with convenient window in Avery, was kind enough to host
the Avery-side equipment. This consisted of the crufty computer, a keyboard
(necessary for boot), a wireless router in his window, and use of his port.
The wireless router with high gain antennas as seen outside Amos's room in Avery
Jeremy's computer went to room 16F, which we later found out is Ricketts storage. It is currently still running and buried under boxes. 36 Mbps across the street! This was faster and more reliable than the one in Avery. Time to spread the joy.
Nobody seriously trusts WEP for security. I used OpenVPN to tunnel traffic over the wireless link. The linux box was 192.168.2.1 and the FreeBSD box was 192.168.2.2, using tap because that was the FreeBSD box seemd to like. The next problem was getting everything to route over it. Linux box was running NAT to 131.215.159.116. Jeremy was gone eating somewhere. I had never used FreeBSD before. Yet somehow, I managed to recompile the kernel to support NAT. A DHCP server was installed by source because learning ports, while fun, would take more thought though it's probably simple. Anyhow the FreeBSD box got a DHCP server giving 10.0-3.*.* IP addresses and a NAT setup to translate to 192.168.2.2. In hindsight, the NAT on the FreeBSD box was unnecessary and 10.*.*.* could have been added to the linux box's routing tables.
At some point, probably around 8 pm Saturday, Rumen (who was in trailer 16) was the first test case. It worked! Time to get cables and switches to spread the love.