Stompbox - It's an Access Point now.
I received the Senao Net2511 MP WiFi card in the mail yesterday and the stompbox booted right up into AP mode. The card's got a 200mW transmitter and should belt out the signal quite well, even with the antennas I stole from my WRT-54G. One of these days I'll take the laptop out in the field and see how far it reaches.
I also re-installed the Stompbox image and reconfiguring it just to back out a few mistakes I'd made. Just for reference, if you happen to use the Stompbox image, do NOT "apt-get update" or you'll get an upgraded glib6 with your next install which chews up almost all of the space remaining on the CF card and causes library issues with some of the stripped down packages, most notably dpkg.
It's a good idea to backup the image frequently to make restoring easy. I used "dd if=/dev/sda of=stomp.img bs=8192 count=15648" to make the backup. The count is important as devices don't always have an EOF to mark when to quit and dd isn't smart enough to see the seek errors.
OpenVPN is now installed using a back ported package to woody although I don't think it's very happy with the config I copied from my old router. Right now it connects fine but dies of a SIGUSR1 every 30 seconds. I can't see how anything local is giving the sig, so I'm assuming it's something internal to the openvpn process. (USR1 is the signal used to ask the daemon to reconnect.) The server logs don't seem to indicate any problems so I'm pretty sure it's the client.
March 27th, 2006 at 9:13 pm
I just did a little reading on stompbox. I seriously think I need to have one of these. Where should I start?
March 27th, 2006 at 9:16 pm
Aha, I see the forums have a bit of info, I'm off! . . .
March 27th, 2006 at 11:27 pm
The original article that I followed is here:
http://stompboxnetworks.com/
That article covered most of the tricky bits and the forums are a good source of info. Some knowledge of how debian works is handy. Be carful with apt-get and don't run apt-get update, it'll force upgrade of more packages than fit on the CF card.
Be warned that this is not a real cheap project. I've got a bit over $300 in hardware not counting the EVDO card and cellular antenna. Monthly service is $80 through Verizon. Since this is my sole method of net access it's easier to justify the monthly cost.
I've started an outline for a full tutorial but don't know when I'll actually get time to write it all.
My next task is to get the openvpn working and maybe find a vpnc package that will work. Once that's done I'll try to do some writing. Eventually I'll want GPS and a webcam, but funds don't allow that yet.
If you run into any snags, feel free to drop me an email and I'll try to help. My address is anton at lr2 dot com.
May 15th, 2006 at 3:33 pm
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