I signed up the auto parts store today. The install went really well. No problems this time.

I'm still having finance problems with SBC. They don't take Discover card. I'm waiting for my payment to my AMX card to go through and I'll use it. Geesh.

Ahh, things are moving forward. I just faxed over my credit card info to SBC. I had to pay for three months of service to get started. I hope that it will only be another week or two to get this installed. My network is beyond it's max and a few of my customers are starting to complain about the slowness.

This morning I get a FAX from SBC that was suppose to go to someone else. Funny.

I guess my order is still held up in Finance. They are still checking my references. How hard can it be. I've paid them $180 a month for over a year! That should be a good reference right there. So I'm sitting at the 30th and I told all my customers that I would have the T1 in by now. I guess they will just have to wait another month for SBC to get it's act together.

I'm still waiting for SBC to get back to me on the T1/Frame Relay order that I placed on the 5th. Still my contacts have no clue as to what my status is. I'm hoping that I don't lose internet access before I get the Frame installed. I've canceled my server with my current provider for the 30th. But it looks like I'm not going to get my new line setup for another two or three weeks. Did I ever mention that I dislike SBC? Ever since they charged me for 6 months of DSL that I did not have.

I've calculated my WISP costs. This is what I've come up with:

$900 per WPOP.
* Net Nimble WRIP
* FAB-Corp Antenna's and Cables.
$800 per month for bandwidth.
* SBC Frame Relay (1.5Mb/s)

I've spent about $3500 for startup, and now $800 per month for bandwidth. I'm charging on the average of $24.95 for connections. At 32 connections I should cover my bandwidth. Each customer will buy their own equipment. I have figured out how to get the equipment for $180. It's a D-Link ethernet bridge in a plastic weather proof box. It's powered over ethernet. I have a Vagi antenna mounted on a steel 2 foot mast.

I just read an article about the cost to start a WISP. They said $20,000 to start it up. They are saying $2000 per POP site. I think they need to re-evaluate their pricing again.

Lightning.... It took out two customers last week. Fried two bridges, a Linksys and a D-Link. The power comes up, but no data connections. I'm not sure if it's a firmware problem, or a hardware one. I'll just send them back for RMA. One was inside the other was outside, so I guess it does not matter where it's at. I'm going to have to figure out a way to ground them.

Posting from Mini-Me... Seems like the new kernel fixed the reboot problem. I have not had an unexpected reboot since I recompiled and installed 2.4.20 with APM. Touch-typing is almost impossible on the small keyboard. Still works great for a wireless test tool.

Now I've run into another problem. At random the computer will just reboot. I guess it could be bad RAM. Maybe the CPU. I'm not sure. It does get really hot when I use it for more than 20 minutes. I'm starting to get bummed. I'm going to put my Windows drive into it and see if that causes it to reboot.... Just as soon as I finish recompiling the Kernel to support APM.

PS, Why doesn't Debian come with APM in the kernel! Gesh.

In my attempt to get the screen brighter, I killed the drive on mini-me. So now I have to reinstall. The story... I found a utility to adjust the brightness of the screen on my little Toshiba Libretto. Only problem is that it's a stupid X application. So I spent hours downloading and installing X on it. Well it turns out that X is not so stable on it. It crashed a few times, but I thought it was nothing that bad. Well, I started playing with X again and was running some Toshiba utilities and wham! Mini-me crashed. This time it corrupted the boot sector of the hard drive. I could not figure out a way to fix it....Back to the drawing board with it. I've got the HDD pulled out and in my other laptop reinstalling Debian again... This time I'm doing a full block scan on it to make sure that it will find any bad blocks and naturalize them. I'll have to recompile a new Kernel again to get the APM stuff. Gesh, that takes about 10 hours. Mini-me gets really hot also. I should only run it for 15 minuets at a time.

Well, mostly up and going now. Apt upgraded the Postgresql server to 7.3. I had to update all the database tables. That was not fun.