Reconnecting to WTHESS, the chronicles
Δευτέρα, 08 Μάϊος 2006, 12:53Last year, after I had finnished my mandatory 1 year service to the military, I had to find some place to leave. Luckly, it was time for my friend Yorgos to serve the army for one year so he let me take his house until I find a better place for myself. Yorgos had just connected to wthess network by setting up an old pc ecquiped with a WiFi card on the rooftop of his house. Since then, I'm an active member of this community and have been enjoying the benefits of it. That is totally free communication of any level and type with my mates, instant messaging, email, VoIP, multiplayer games, file sharing and internet sharing.
But someday I had to move. This happened in February, so I had to setup my own rooftop router.
How hard it is, and how much does it cost?
First, I had to investicate the new building and assess the potential. The initial problem was to find a route for 2 cables (power and ethernet) from my apartment to the rooftop, that is 2 floors away. Another problem was where to place the antenna(s). Well, people are suspicious and biased, they worry about things like radiation, communication privacy of their cell phones, bad tv signal reception and stuff like that. There are also rules concerning constructions on buildings set by the urban design authority. So, the whole installation should be at least discreet if not entirely invisible. At the time, this seemed imposible. The only way I could pass the cables outside seemed to be by opening an ugly hole to the wall, and even then the structure of the building would force me to leave the cables hanging far away from the main wall.
A nice thing in this world is that good people can be found anywhere at any time and I was fortunate enough to meet one, the building manager (A not very nice thing in this world is that bad people can also be found anywhere at any time, I just hope won't meet that one). Not only he took the whole thing warmly and enthusiasticly, but he also gave me the best hint on how to install the wiring. There is a couple of water pipes connecting each apartment's bathroom with the rooftop, reserved for future use with solar heaters.
Then, moving to the next big problem, where to place the antenna(s). Some of my wthessian friends gathered on my rooftop one nice sunday evening. We figured our target peers by using my laptop ecquiped with a pcmcia WiFi card connected to a hand-made feeder. We scanned the perimeter using Netstumbler program and established visual contact with the final targets. After further talk with the building manager the final decision for the antenna placement was taken. The antenna pole would be placed on the side wall of the small house protecting the elevator machine and the router pc upon its' roof where it would be better protected and out of reach from other people.
Since everything was figured out, the only thing left was the installation. For the router I used an old pc I had, a Pentium II 300MHz and 64 MB RAM ecquiped with a PCI Planet WL-8310 WiFi card and an old CD-RW drive, no hard drive or floppy requiered. This costed me nothing since I already had the pc and the card was a birthday gift from Yorgos. A rough estimation of the cables' length was 15-20 meters. I bought 30 meters of UTP Cat5e cable and 20 meters of power cord, those costed me about 20 euro with the endings and plugs included, but forgot to ask how much was per meter, just payed and left the shop. to protect the router pc from air, dust, rain etc, a plastic water proof box was used. This box was enhanced with 3 pigtails for WiFi signal output, a UTP and a power supply input, all made by Air-Guy with a final cost of 45 euro. Air-Guy was also the provider of the 5 meter wbc400 cable that connected the box with the antenna, this should cost at least 13 euro but Air-Guy is a nice fellow and gave it to me for nothing. Finally, the antenna, an omni directional at 9db bought from an online shop at the cost of 51 euro. I also have to include the cost of a light 6 step ladder, 34 euro.
The installation of the cables was more than half of a day's hard work. The pipes have a 90 degrees turn and the cables couldn't slide after that turn. Some olive oil helped to lubricate the inner surface of the pipes. At the end, I had blisters on my hands and everything messy and oily but I had electricity and ethernet connection to the rooftop. I installed the pole with the antenna and connected all the cables, my rooftop-pc was ready to operate, all it was needed was the operating system. All wthess wireless links use Paladir (greek site) for that. Paladir is a linux based home-brew OS which is always provided as a small iso image that can fit in a floppy disk. Thanasakis, which is one of the developers and maintainers of Paladir provided me the required image configured appropriately according to the needs of my router pc. No need for me to know anything about linux or paladir, just burned the image to a cdrw disk and slide it into the drive.
That's it. I'm connected.