What little I've seen of the ALIX board impressed me. But, is the cost including mouting hardware and the minipci wifi card? The $173 price tag strikes me that it doesn't.
Am I correct to assume no chassis and transplanting the existing wifi card from the nucab? On 17 Nov 2008 19:31:17 -0800, Russell Senior <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > On Sunday afternoon, I was alerted that we had problems at our > LuckyLab node on SE Hawthorne. In working to get it up and running > again, we encountered a problem of growing significance. > > About 30 of our nodes use the old nucab boxes as routers/captive > portals. These were built out of donated PCs and installed years ago. > They are bulky, make noise, use energy and occasionally fail, but the > bigger problem now is that they were often built with a partitioning > scheme that will no longer allow the operating system software to be > updated without substantial gyrations. To upgrade them would be very > labor intensive, during a time when available Personal Telco volunteer > hours are very limited. > > An alternative to the nucabs which is much smaller, uses much less > electricity (about 5 or 6 Watts), is fanless so it makes no noise, and > is actually faster and has more RAM, is the Alix.2d3 board that I have > been bringing to recent meetings. It has three ethernet ports, which > is enough for any PTP node application that I know of. It even does > passive Power over Ethernet. They are more than powerful enough to > run our old familiar NoCatAuth captive portal. > > I put one of these together as an experiment and used it at the One > Web Day event in September and it worked great. There would be a > little more work involved in developing the software to go onto the > devices, but that work would amortize across the whole deployment. > > This afternoon, I priced out what it would cost to purchase the > hardware for 30 of these, to completely replace the old nucabs. The > total is (assuming $20 per 1GB CompactFlash card) $5200. That > includes the Alix 2D3 board, an indoor enclosure, a 15V switching > power supply, a passive PoE injector and the CompactFlash card. That > comes out to $173 per device. Personal Telco has some cash, but not > enough to cover that cost. A substantial fraction of it would need to > be raised from donations, grants or some other fund-raising scheme. > > There is an argument that we don't need the nucab or any replacement, > that if the nucabs are becoming unmaintainable, we should just unplug > the nucab and use a plain wireless router. I think the nucab and/or > its replacement does serve several useful functions: > > a) it allows for a captive portal, which in turn: > > 1) allows us to communicate with node users; > > 2) lets the node host claim credit for hosting the node; > > 3) it allows us to track the amount of usage, to help understand > how well our nodes are serving the community. > > b) it allows for remote debugging and administration of nodes, which > reduces the time lag involved in waiting for problem reports to > filter back and the volunteer time to visit the node to > diagnose. Having a nucab or alternative present reduces the > maintenance burden. > > c) it allows for network abusers to be identified and blocked > individually rather than en-mass. > > d) it allows the construction of vpn tunnels that allow remote > administration even through non-cooperative upstream nat'ing > gateways. > > It might be possible in some instances to replace the nucabs with > something cheaper than an alix, such as one of our Netgear WGT634U. > That is true, however: > > a) some problems have been reported with the wifidog captive portal > we've used with the WGT. > > b) the WGT is not as robust in extremes of temperature and usage as > the Alix > > c) The WGT probably does not have the processing power to handle vpn > tunnels so well. > > In review, the existing nucab infrastructure is rotting. Few people > know how to fix them. We can no longer keep their software upgraded > as we have in the past. It is just a matter of time until they start > to fail in a manner that is impractical to fix. It seems to me that > now is the time to think about how to replace them, and that the Alix > looks like a nice way to do that. > > Thoughts? Comments? > > > -- > Russell Senior, Secretary > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > > -- Sent from my mobile device --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ The Personal Telco Project - http://www.personaltelco.net/ Donate to PTP: http://www.personaltelco.net/donate Archives: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.network.wireless.portland.general/ Etiquette: http://www.personaltelco.net/index.cgi/MailingListEtiquette List information: http://lists.personaltelco.net To post to this group, send email to ptp-general@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
