Not wanting to rain on anyone's parade, but I am of the opinion that this is a *bad* idea... for one main reason:
Power Consumption. As Steve alluded to, solar equipment is not cheap. I think the key to a cost-effective solution is to buy a real access point that can function as a repeater. The smaller and simpler the better. What you pay for this hardware over and above the cost of a LEAF box will likely be less than the additional solar panels, batteries and grief of building and maintaining a LEAF install in a less than hospitable environment. The AP is more likely to keep going in the cold of winter and heat of summer than that 386 is. A simple repeater has no need for firewall abilities, dhcp, ssh or any of the other goodies in LEAF! These abilities are better used at the ends to prevent unauthorized access via the repeater. If you can get the repeater concept to go, perhaps something like nocatauth from nocat.net would be a better solution to keep the neighbours from stealing your bandwidth (if that's a concern). Brock | > I'm putting in a wireless link from friends in city to farm for faster | > Internet access and need to have a remote repeater site on hill running | > from battery and solar power. LEAF should be ideal for this. I will make | > a power supply to run the mother board direct from the battery to reduce | > losses (about %15) from using Inverter and PC supply. Sun power might | > be free but solar panels are not cheap, so the lower the losses and | > power requirements the better.
