History of Valley Zero

After about 8 months of outdoors in a tree (in a tupperware container), the WRT54GS was starting to act a little flakey.

It may have been something else (like Valley Air, the airport express, doing some funky-WDS type stuff).

But I took advantage of my brother Ben being in town to return up the tree, and swap out the access point (so now instead of a WRT54GS and a WET11, it is just a WRT54G).

It is running openwrt as the firmware, and I hope to get nocatsplash and openvpn configured soon.

I will be testing/troubleshooting the WRT54GS (old AP).

Old notes from about Nov 2004 below

Currently, this is a Linksys AP, hanging about 55' up in a tree [picture] with a big external (omni) antenna.

WEP is off.

There is probably a decent range with a directional antenna.

Hopefully the Lower Valley Node will be able to see the Valley Zero now.

The setup is a litte strange--I want a totally wireless solution, so hung up in the tree I've got WET11 ethernet bridge picking up the signal off of my home wifi network.

This WET11 is plugged into the upstream (or LAN) port of a WRT54GS AP, which has the ESSID of juneauwireless and is connected to an omni antenna on loan from Myron Davis.

The next step (maybe over Christmas break?) is to replace the extension cord I'm currently using for power with the solar panel/battery/charge controller setup that I've got.

Also very high on the list is to add VPN access from this node to the Downtown nodes.

I'm futzing around with the antenna configuration on the WRT54GS.

It seems like (from this picture [1]) that I want to use the right antenna (no internal cable for less loss).

But I'm not sure which antenna the nie omni is connected to.

OK, after the great first meeting, I was inspired to give it a shot--I upgraded the firmware to Alchemy-6.0-RC5a v3.01.3.8sv .

It was indeed a piece of cake.

Just click along the web interface and the upgrade worked.

I was slightly worried--in the readme it said for versions 1.0 and 1.1 of the WRT54GS, and mine reports to be version 2.0something.

It gave me a brief pause, then I clicked along and it worked.

Now I'm tempted to flash to openwrt and get the vpn connection working.

We'll see..

I got ssh access working, but it take a few steps, so I'll outline them here:

Through the Administration -> Managment control panel, Enable 'Boot wait','SSHD', 'SSHD password login'.

Use "ssh-keygen -t rsa" to generate a passphrase-less ssh keypair, then paste the text into the 'authorized SSH keys' field. Since the router has no storage for usernames/passwords we must use SSH keys stored with the routers other settings. Multiple keys can be loaded.

voila! ssh in as root (I found some helpful info for this at http://www.renderlab.net/projects/wardrive/wrt54g/sveasoft1.html)

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I got the right antenna (right as in right vs left, not sure about right or wrong) and I cranked it up to 150 mW.

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OK, I think right was wrong.

I switched to the left antenna for send and receiver, and now I can use the wireless network scanner and see 7 networks (rather than the 3 I could pick up on the right antenna).

I also did step up the power to 100 mW (150 mW seemed unstable, so I switched back to 80 mW.

It could have just been flakiness due to using the wrong antenna.

Or the fact that it is 0 F out there right now.

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I think that is the end of the mini-hack-fest.

I need to get openvpn and nocatauth/splash going next.

Looks like maybe the solution is openwrt... Not sure when I'll find the time if I have to climb any learning curve there..