Marina base station coverage?

I'm trying to guessitimate what sort of antennae I'll need to cover an area of slips in a marina. The coverage area is about 600' wide and about 400' deep. The starting area for coverage is about 200' from the base of where the antenna would be mounted. That is, there's a dockmaster's office that's about 200' from the nearest boats that would need coverage. There's a row of lift-slip motorboats but it's not necessary for them to have coverage. If they got coverage by chance that'd be great but it's not required. Most directional antenna have a horizontal beam of about 60 degrees. That's not wide enough for things at the edges of the 200' distance to the first pier. My boat happens to be in the very center of the beam but I'd want to have a plan to cover the other boats at the edges too.

So what's typical in this sort of situation? I'm assuming it's unwise to hang two directional antennae off a single radio, correct? So I'd have to add another access point with it's own antenna, right? Or could I hang two off a single WRT54GS?

Since this is a 'donation' of sorts to get free access in the marina I'm hoping to try it using something like this antenna:

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Mainly because it can be mounted inside a window using suction cups. If it works and the level of traffic through the wireless doesn't otherwise disrupt the limited amount of traffic the existing, single desktop computer expects then other locations/antennae could be considered.

Basically, they've been dragging their feet at the marina (and some sister locations) for ages on getting WiFi working. The main location has been attempting to make it 'pay for' service and it's meeting with considerable failure. Coverage is weak and people won't pay for that. So here I've convinced the onsite manager to let us 'give it a try' provided it doesn't otherwise muck up his use of the wire, which is *extrememly* limited anyway since all office work is done at another location. Mainly just mail and web with a Citrix session. So by donating the time/effort/devices he's willing to share some bandwidth. There's no live-aboards here so it's not like it'd be much more than lightweight use. But we'd certainly be charting the consumption (gotta love MRTG) to keep things from getting out of hand.

So starting with something like that panel antenna would let us give it a try without having to mount anything permanently, at least not during this trial. But it being stuck on the window would prevent it from getting bumped out of alignment like one just placed on table might. Of course there's always the risk of getting unstuck from the glass... but that's trivial during this trial.

-Bill Kearney

Reply to
Bill Kearney
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"Bill Kearney" hath wroth:

Sector antenna. Beamwidths vary from 60 degrees to 180 degrees.

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You cannot hang 2 antennas off a WRT54G as the diversity switch algorithm will not scan between the antennas fast enough to be useful. If you had only one user, that might be functional, but not with more than one.

You can attach two antennas to a single antenna port on the WRT54GS by using a power divider, splitter, or combiner. See:

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catch is that if the antennas "see" each other, the pattern will be some conglomeration of their individual patterns and probably not look like anything useful. This works best for where the antennas are far apart or on opposite sides of a building.

Jeff's rules for community wireless networks:

  1. Never do anything for free. You can always give a discount or a temporary free deal, but you can never go from free to paid.
  2. Everything requires support, tinkering, negotiation, and more money.
  3. There's always someone just outside your coverage area.
  4. Support calls always arrive at inconvenient times.
  5. The surest sign of success is abuse and pollution.
  6. Free help never seems to arrive.
  7. Backers are aptly named.
  8. Learn to play policeman, executioner, judge, and Solomon. All are necessary skills for community networks.

SMTP is a good thing. I did quit a bit of that at ISP's many years ago.

Hints: Concentrate on the antennas and the topography and never mind the amplifiers, exotic access points, and high power. Be very concerned about interference problems, especially from other wireless networks. Take the time to do a site survey. Use MIMO on the AP's if possible as reflections in the marina are sure to be a problem. Install and use some form of bandwidth management (QoS) to avoid one user hogging the whole system.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

"Bill Kearney" hath wroth:

Same as:

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Sheet:
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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

On Thu, 29 Jun 2006 10:33:26 -0700, Jeff Liebermann wrote in :

SNMP? ;)

Reply to
John Navas

John Navas hath wroth:

Sorry. AOS (Acronym Overload Syndrome) problem. I also get PPTP and PPPoE backwards all the time. After we run out of domain names, I think the various domain registries could sell acronyms. Maybe that will reduce AID (Acronym Infestation Disease).

I even wrote the instructions for MRTG on W95/98/ME (which Tobias detests and doesn't want to support) about 6 years ago:

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Personally, I prefer RRDTool but that requires a web server to use and is a bit messy to setup.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

These are $5k/yr (and up) slips. I won't be the least bit sympathetic to the whiners at the fringes if they're not willing to pony up some cash. But even without their help it's not like it's going to break any banks getting this gear.

Likewise, if its a free service then interruptions are to be expected. Sometimes done deliberately to 'adjust' usage patterns. Nothing like silently dropping service to a given MAC when things get out of hand. I've had plenty of experience administering large networks and dealing with (l)users. I'll have my marine-grade LART handy.

Playing Solomon hits the nail on the head. I generally find it's better to let them think things are being run poorly (or even incompetently), rather than taking a confrontational "informed" approach. Just let things mysteriously become "unreliable" for them until they wander off finding other things to occupy themselves. No sense arguing with them or confronting them about spending all their bandwidth downloading p*rn or whatever. Just let the net flake out, perhaps timed appropriately right before the end of those video clips...

BoFH rules apply!

The biggest challenge I'm expecting is avoiding freeloader abuse by folks anchoring just outside the sea wall of the marina. Hopefully some down tilt on the antennae and adjusting of the radio output power will help stave that off. But we're also planning on not broadcasting the SSID and changing it on a semi-random basis. This is certainly 'not secure' but it's a bit of security-through-obscurity. There will be a notice posted in the club house with the current SSID. And since it's free, they'll get what they pay for, support-wise.

There will be no support. If they get it working, great, otherwise, pound sand.

I'm really only expecting about 8 or so vessels will even bother making use of it. I suppose I could've just signed up for comcast and stuffed a router in the pedestal near my slip. But that'd require paying those rat bastards money and I hate comcast. This way it ends up shared with other slipholders and I get to learn some new stuff.

Yes, already done one, informally with netstumbler. Existing coverage is exceptionally poor (thus my embarking on this journey). There's a WEP secured network and a weak open one. Otherwise it's relatively barren, signal-wise. This also gleaned from doing a site survey lookup from the WRT54G running dd-wrt with a pair of 9db omni antennae. Even with better antennae the number of SSID didn't increase.

Yep, already expecting to do this. Mainly to make sure the one wired desktop has guaranteed bandwidth on demand. This whole thing is freeloading the uplink from the marina office. The one guy in the office doesn't use it for all that much so it's largely idle. But on the few occasions he's likely to be doing anything I'm going to try configuring it such that his box gets priority over everything else.

My only real question at this point concerns what antennae to use. Your suggestion of sector type is probably the most appropriate. Getting that square panel, while it might help the inital 'proof of concept' would largely be a waste of money, but not all that much. I could always recycle it for on-boat use as a directional.

Hmm, I'm wondering if a 120 degree sectional would suffice? Like this one:

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the 180:
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The 120 might be better in that it'd avoid serving anything on-shore. That and it's quite a bit less expensive than the 180.

-Bill Kearney

Reply to
Bill Kearney

"Bill Kearney" hath wroth:

I think you're missing my point on charging for service. It's infinitely easier to reduce rates than it is to go from a free service to a for pay service. Start by charging for the connectivity and then give the good guys a "deal". That makes you a good guy instead of an evil bill collector.

Incidentally, I forgot to mumble something about installing a RADIUS server and using WPA-RADIUS for authentication. That solves two problems. You get easy user identification along with individual and temporary encryption keys which are different for each user.

Sigh. You can probably get away with herding corporate employees, but herding cats and sailors just doesn't work. They have their own expectations of what constitutes proper reliability and operation and on how to contact tech support at 1AM. I have the same problems with my neighborhood LAN, where some neighbors seem to think I run a public utility. I find it best to be tolerant and not vindictive as I have to deal with these people on a regular basis.

Nope. I've found it just the opposite. Friends and neighbors have different expectations than customers. That's another reason why I suggested charging for the service. That will turn your friends and neighbors into customers.

Manual bandwidth management and throttling is a necessary part of WISP management. The trick is to walk that fine line between managing abuse and outright censorship. It's also considered good form to inform abusers of the problem their causing. The way I do it is to charge the neighbors by their traffic volume.

On a different neighborhood WLAN, they include everyone's monthly traffic report so that the whole neighborhood can get a feel for the typical usage, why someone is paying more than everyone else, and how badly they're hogging the system. Everyone abuses the bandwidth for the first month. After that, no problems. The report also reminds them that someone is watching.

Only in support newsgroups. In reality, most of the banter in alt.sysadmin.recovery is wishful thinking and is more a reflection of what IT would like to do to employees and customers, and not how they actually perform their duties. I would be seriously worried if you actually believed many of the stories and retaliatory suggestions posted in alt.sysadmin.recovery.

If you lock up the system with WPA-RADIUS, that won't be much of a worry.

Security by obscurity? I thought you had some experience in such things? All that hiding the SSID does it allow users to setup their own wireless networks on the same channel, create mutual interference, and create difficulties for users to connect. Also, you get the honor of going around and informing everyone that the SSID has changed and helping them make the change to their PC's.

Incidentally, your site survey with Netstumbler is inadequate. You should use Kismet with a Linux LiveCD so that you can see networks that hide their SSID.

Right. Zero security with rotten service and secret handshakes from the start. Were you planning on this adventure being successful or is self-sabotage part of the plan? Incidentally, with such an open system, it's difficult to keep a knowledgeable user out of the system by just MAC filtering as you propose. Anyone with a search engine can figure out how to change their MAC address.

Basically, you have to provide everything that a wired dialup/DSL ISP provides. You have infrastructure (hardware), support, setup help, information dissemination, billing, abuse mitigation, maintenance, upgrades, complaints, backhaul, etc. With wireless, you get the added enjoyment of a shared and unreliable distribution mechanism.

Wishful thinking. When the boat owner, from whom you usually borrow tools and supplies, wants help with his computah, you have the option of playing ignorant, playing busy, or just get it over with and help him. Usually the latter is easiest. You can't run a service without some form of support. However, make sure you charge (or trade) for it or your help will surely be abused.

Walk around and count computers on board. If laptops, about 90% have wireless built in. Figure on all of them wanting to connect.

Use Kismet on a Linux LiveCD. You're not checking for coverage as much as checking for hidden WLAN's that might cause interference.

You might want to price the cost of more than one IP address from the ISP. That will make separating the office LAN from the freeloaders much easier using two routers. Also, look at the Sonicwall TZ-170SP wireless router which has separate security "zones".

180 is magic. I don't see how they do it. In most cases, it's easier and better to use 120 degree sectors. Note that you can't use the same channel on adjacent sectors as there will be havoc where they overlap at the boundaries. The choice is really based on your coverage area.

Yeah, probably 120 is safer.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

On Fri, 30 Jun 2006 09:05:29 -0700, Jeff Liebermann wrote in :

I strongly second that advice. Never make anything free. Instead, set a fair price ($10/month?), and then give out (say) coupons for free months of service, and perhaps tie that into monthly changes of a shared WPA key.

I agree this is better than a shared key, but it may be more trouble than it's worth.

I agree. Having a group of wasted boaters pounding on your cabin door at 2 AM isn't fun.

Again, I agree.

I've not had good reaction to that -- people have come to expect the comfort level of fixed price for service. It also raises the issue of billing in arrears, whereas I think it makes more sense to bill for this sort of thing in advance.

Yikes! I really don't think that's a good idea. It encourages a kind of mob rule that can easily get out of hand.

Or even a regularly expiring shared key.

I also think it's a bad idea. Make the SSID clear and meaningful; e.g., "Bills wireless Internet, slip X-9999"

Again, I agree.

I think Jeff's more right than wrong, especially with respect to live-aboards.

Also keeps the marina out of the loop if (when) the cops come looking for an abuser.

Good suggestion. In general, I strongly recommend a hotspot-type router for this kind of thing.

Reply to
John Navas

No, I got your point.

I'm saying the for the minimal cost of this hardware, and the free DSL uplink, there's not much incentive to bother dealing with accepting people's money. Once you take money from them they start getting expectations. If it sucks then I'll just dismantle it. I can simply punt to getting my own comcraptastic cable modem and stuff an AP in the dock pedestal. I have absolutely no desire to put myself in a position where people are paying me money and bugging the crap out of me for 'support'. I'd rather it cost me some trival amount of money to maintain it and remain free of their contact. If they wanna make it better than what I have planned they're free to figure it all out for themselves.

And let's back up a second, the marina here has sister sites. They've attempted to get some pay-for services going and it's not gone well. Mainly because they made the mistake of giving expectations. This is not the case here.

No, I have no desire to deal with the likely conspiracy nuts that want to winge about someone 'knowing' what they're doing on the net. Sure, they're idiots for thinking it, but start tying a username/password to it and things go downhill. Not to mention the jackass calling me in the middle of the night having forgotten their password. Again, open and NO support seems like a much better situation.

Let's be clear, NO SUPPORT. If it's up, it's up, if not, tough. I'm 6'4", not shy and know the value of my time. If they want something better they're more than welcome to go do it. But make no mistake, I won't be giving them any impression they can bug me about a damn thing.

Ah, neighbors are somewhat different than slipholders in a non-liveaboard situation. I can move my boat to another marina, it's not as easy with a house.

But don't think I'm missing your point. Thus, from the outset, this is a free service with absolutely no guarantees or support.

They're more than welcome to become someone else's customers. I do not want those headaches, period.

Ah, now here we completely agree. I have no desire to censor content. But if some nitwit insists on moving a virtual freight train of p*rn over the airwaves while everyone else is being reasonable then it's time to throttle that consumption. Not based on anything other than excessive consumption. Sure, they can play MAC address games but I've low expectation of that considering the audience.

Yeah well, when you do this you raise the spectre of having snooped not on just how much they wasted, but on what. Trust me, they tend to get their knickers in much more of a twist when they think their content patterns are being monitored. To drop service intermittently, when no expectation of reliability is implied, is perhaps a far less confrontational mechanism. I'm fine with them thinking I run a shitty service, all I want is my occasional Wifi bandwidth without hassles.

After all, this is a upscale, pleasureboat marina we're talking about here. Having WiFi on it ain't exactly a 'critical' need like one might expect in a residence.

Yes, having open webpages showing consumption works wonders for self-policing behavior modification. At some point, should consumption get out of hand, I'd certainly want to implement it.

What, you mean I can't electrify the handrails to improve the support call numbers?

And I'm not talking about those pikers over in a.s.r. I'm speaking more in terms of the classic BoFH perspective.

Manually ditching freeloaders, or even having some scripts doing it, seems like a lot less hassle.

Yeah, there's plenty of truth to that. But given the location of this it's not like I'm expecting a lot of interference or other services sprouting up. Besides, the folks hosting the uplink ain't real bright. Not broadcasting the SSID lets them think something's hidden. I know better, you know better, etc... but it's all about humoring them. At some point, as things evolve, there's certainly room for change.

NO SUPPORT. A posted sign, if they can't figure it out from there that's just tough. And I'm not just playing the bastard here. This is a frill and if the folks want to make use of it they're more than welcome to educate themselves on how. I have no need to add customers, nor am I building a service on which I need growth, click-throughs or anything else.

True, on my list of things to do. And to do on a regular basis.

Hey, if it works for me and three other folks eager for access then it'll be a success. That it might not work for the 100 or so other slipholders really doesn't bother me. Thus far no more than a dozen folks have expressed any interest whatsoever. Frankly, I expect it to remain that low.

And sitting on their boat for a few hours in the afternoon evening means it's pretty unlikely they're going to waste the time/effort. This is basically a frill to let them fire up the laptop, get/send mail and check a couple of web pages for weather and event info. Should needs grow beyond that (and I'm not saying it couldn't happen) there's plenty of opportunity to improve it. Even if that means going to a pay-for model (run by someone other than me, that's for sure). These are boat owners, they're used to getting absolutely gouged for everything, often with very little resembling decent treatment.

Eh, two access points and a likelihood of about a dozen users. I'm not exactly worried about infrastructure and costs.

Hey, if they fire up the blender and make some margaritas then we'll talk. I've met most of the slipholders and, by and large, they're a nice bunch. If anything a NoCat splash page or wiki will sprout up to help them. But no phone calls or handholding is ever going to be implied, offered or provided. Besides, I'm already the one known for having the tools and supplies and they're right nice about asking me for things.

I've been a consultant for 2 decades and my wife's an attorney. I'm well aware the value of time.

Already have and spoken with folks about it. They're fine with the general plan. This is not a service 'sponsored' by the marina or part of their slipholder contract. It's an unsupporte freebie and they grasp the concept.

True, and if traffic volumes are such that it's an issue I'd definitely go down that road. The office network here is ONE machine, very infrequently used for little more than mail and web surfing. There's no restaurant, snack bar or other activities going on that require anything more than very minimal bandwidth.

Good point. I'll pickup the 120 and see how well it covers. If that's not enough then a spare AP and another 120 on the pole should work nicely.

Once again, thanks Jeff!

-Bill Kearney

Reply to
Bill Kearney

You miss the point about not wanting to have any sort of financial or support relationship with these folks. The service is up, or not, and that's the extent of the relationship.

Were they dumb enough to try this I'd be more than glad to show them to the nearby water.

And if you're not engaging in any sort of financial relationship with them you're free of any of these headaches. Different headaches, perhaps.

Two words: Benevolent dictatorship. That's the idea here. Like it or make another one yourselves.

You MUST be kidding. I have absolutely NO desire to have these folks contacting me. It'll be some random word.

We HAVE NO LIVEABOARDS at this marina. Were that the case then some of what's been suggested might have relevance.

Yes, well, we'll burn that bridge when we come to it. Should the local LE folks get their act together enough to actually be able to DO something like this then I'd start to worry.

Guys, you're making good points, they're just not of direct relevance to the situation at hand.

-Bill Kearney

Reply to
Bill Kearney

John Navas hath wroth:

I have only one wireless system running a RADIUS server. The real advantage is that they don't need to distribute a system wide WPA key. Just a user login and password. The per-session generated WPA keys are just an added bonus.

No mob rule in sight. There's a story here that might be of interest. Unfortunately, it's not a good fit for a shared harbor wireless system.

A few miles away is a small community that has a shared dirt road, shared water system, mostly shared internet access. In other words, they're familiar with sharing. The problem was that they were too far from the CO to get DSL, and the CATV coax was 1.5 miles away. So, they purchased a DirecWay satellite system and ran CAT5 and coax all over the neighborhood. With 13 houses and about 30 users, the DirecWay access was easily overloaded. I was involved in setting up the QoS system and SNMP based usage tracking and billing system. I also attempted to concoct a version of the DirecWay FAP (fair access policy) but failed.

To eliminate bickering, one of the residents wrote some Perl scripts that produced monthly reports of every houses monthly traffic. Since the current "Ultimate Fair Billing System" of the month was based largely on each houses percentage of the total monthly usage. So, everyone was naturally interested in how much the others were using. So, everyone gets a report with the whole neighborhoods usage. It seems to work well and the bickering has been reduced to questioning the accuracy of my monitoring and accounting.

We're currently working on a wired plus wireless link to the end of the CATV coax. If that can be done, then a cable modem will replace the DirecWay link, which should drastically improve the available bandwidth. However, the incentive to do this is not for internet access, but to get VoIP going so that some of the residents can pull the plug on Ma Bell.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Heh, I implemented a setup like this for a K12 private school. The idea was to make the list of DNS lookups visible, but not associated with any workstations. And then make subnet consumption stats likewise visible. Thus everyone could see what domains were being accessed and what departments (by subnet more or less) were consuming as a percentage of total bandwidth. Worked wonders for curtailing 'inappropriate' wastes of bandwidth. I'd certainly want to avoid publishing DNS lookups for a system involving adults in a public setting, as that wanders dangeously close to censorship. But presenting consumption stats, without direct the correlation to an actual user is certainly a good way to let the rabble decide how to refrain from abusing things. Not that it forces them, or exposes any one person to inordinate attention/ridicule, more that when they everyone could be watching the decide to curtail their behavior. Sounds like that sort of thing works in your rural setup too.

Even with this there's always some malcontent that rails about censorship. C'est la vie.

-Bill Kearney

Reply to
Bill Kearney

On Fri, 30 Jun 2006 15:47:33 -0400, "Bill Kearney" wrote in :

Fair enough, but FWIW here's my own experience:

  1. Free may seem a good idea in beginning, but you might feel differently in the future.
  2. People are more likely to abuse things that are free than things that have value.
  3. Putting a price on support tends to be a better way of discouraging people from asking for support than simply stating that there isn't any support.

And wind up in the slammer for assault? Really?

I'd worry more about the SPA, RIAA, MPAA, the Feds, and I think the risk is significant.

Again, fair enough. Best of luck. Seriously.

Reply to
John Navas

On Fri, 30 Jun 2006 20:50:11 -0700, Jeff Liebermann wrote in :

I like the idea, but it takes a computer to run the RADIUS server, a hosted 802.11x service, or special firmware, plus administration of the service.

I've seen such things turn ugly. There's also the issue of privacy.

Reply to
John Navas

"Bill Kearney" hath wroth:

Good idea. For what it's worth, I'm a big fan of user fees and metered internet billing. That makes me very unpopular as flat rate billing is extremely popular. However, there are some places where flat rate makes no sense and where resource protection is more important. The DirecWay FAP is a good example. The problem is that now I'm charged with concocting the "Ultimate Fair Billing System" which is far more difficult than I expected. At this time, it's an ugly spreadsheet mess that has to be manually adjusted depending on individual circumstances. For example, how do I bill someone that's out of town for the next 2 months? What do I do about the huge spike in late night use during the end of the skool year two weeks ago? My metamorphosis from Dr Jekyll to Mr Hyde is all too common in discussions on the fairness of my billing system. Oh, why me you ask? It's because I'm allegedly neutral and do not have a vested interest in the community system.

Incidentally, there is a wireless component to the previously mentioned community shared internet system. It's done wonders for complicating the billing. For example, if the kids get together for a cramming session with laptops in tow, do I bill the individuals, or do I bill the house where they're meeting? With wireless, it's by the individual. But if they plug into the house ethernet, it's by the house.

Yep. My neighbors are trying to keep their resident delinquent in line by running all his traffic through a proxy server content filtering service. Apparently, that also includes DNS lookups so I can't see what he's surfing. All his traffic is going to one IP.

The community system has one chronic complainer. He's also the wealthiest person in the bunch, with the longest length of dirt road to traverse, consumes the largest amount of water, and is always last to pay for maintenance and common projects. He complains about literally everything, even when there's no obvious reason to complain. Eventually, someone figured out the magic formula. He hates monthly bills, but is very generous in lump sums. So, the billing was adjusted to reduce the number payments he has to make, which proportionately reduced the number of complaints.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

How difficult is something like that to set up? I'm involved in a similar situation (shared 1.5M/768K DSL) and there's someone sucking up most of it all the time...

Reply to
William P.N. Smith

John Navas hath wroth:

I haven't tried TinyPEAP but it can run inside a WRT54G.

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It's also possible to do the RADIUS authentication over the internet.

I did some tinkering with Radiator:

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it supported RADSec, which is needed for secure authentication over the internet:
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passes traffic through a TCP tunnel instead of the usual UDP. Unfortunately, the requirement evaporated along with the customer so the project died before I could deploy it.

Linksys also has Wireless Guard for the WAP54G:

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They'll authenticate your clients for you for a not so nominal $5/user per month. It's from Wireless Security Corp which is part of McAfee.

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's similar to their offering:
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As long as everyone is yelling at each other (and me), there have been no problems. The shooting starts only after the yelling stops.

As for privacy, the standard offer is that if you want privacy, you go buy your own internet connection. A shared service, by its very nature, requires some incursions into privacy in order to keep the system manageable. Shared internet is a new phenomenon. The rules of what's proper and what's not are still being written. Some compromises will need to be made eventually.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

William P.N. Smith hath wroth:

Not too horrible. It's all based on MRTG. However, there are some tricks. The DW7000 satellite terminal had to be setup as a bridge in order to keep things simple. The router is a Cisco 2514 which really should be replaced as it makes too much fan noise. When this mess goes to cable modem speeds, the 2514 is going to be a bottleneck and will need to be replaced.

I use SNMP and MRTG to gather per IP traffic statistics.

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The accumulated traffic graphs are setup to reset on the first of the month and accumulate throughout the month. They look like a sawtooth waveform. At the beginning of every month, a Perl script:

  1. Archives the MRTG data files.
  2. Creates new blank files.
  3. Generates statistics and totals for each graph.
  4. Conglomerates the numbers into a human readable report.
  5. Grind some useful graphs like % of available bandwidth used by each user.
  6. Grab the monthly statistics from Hughesnet.
  7. Presents a summary on a readable web page.
  8. Generates a text file that is imported into an Excel spreadsheet to do the actual billing.
  9. Whatever else I forgot.

I didn't write the scripts but I don't think you need them. Just find some place in the systems (i.e. the router) for something that supports SNMP and use MRTG to make pretty graphs. If you can't replace the router, you can do it with a managed switch.

I have a dedicated laptop (Micron PII/300) running Red Hat 8 (yeah, I know it's really old) that runs MRTG and collects the data from the Cisco 2514. The built in battery is nice for power failures. The laptop also runs a FreeRadius server to deal with security.

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has been somewhat of a reliability problem as the Micron ocassionally hangs and users cannot authenticate.

The laptop also runs a hacked version of MRTG pingprobe to track the latency from the satellite link, which is useful for maintenance. The biggest headache is saturating the uplink, so that traffic is measured very carefully. I recently added a graph of signal strenght scraped from the internal web server in the DW7000

I have a much simpler system in my office, which has 5 offices and about 30 computers total sharing a single 1500/384 DSL line. I cheat and use the numbers from a Cisco 1900 managed ethernet switch to measure traffic per office. Again, it's SNMP and MRTG. There's no per office accounting. I'm just looking for problems, history, and usage patterns.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

On Sat, 01 Jul 2006 10:52:39 -0700, Jeff Liebermann wrote in :

Likewise.

I don't think flat rate makes any sense at all, but it's become a way of life, so I've learned to live with it. ;)

The best solution I've been able to come up with is a form of DirecWay FAP-type throttling, where speed drops as data consumption goes up, which rewards light users and penalizes bandwidth hogs.

Reply to
John Navas

On Sat, 01 Jul 2006 11:23:07 -0700, Jeff Liebermann wrote in :

AKA "special firmware".

AKA "hosted 802.11x service".

With all due respect, I don't buy that argument.

Reply to
John Navas

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