I finished my upgrades to BMG50 today. The last thing was to change the 35' LMR400 from my antenna to my radio to a 10' one. While I was doing it, I had to make a few changes to the tower. I had to shorten the antenna mast a few feed so the cable would stick out on both sides. I finally mounted the blinker at the top of the mast. I still do not get a 360 degree view of it, but it's wired the correct way now. I even screwed it on. I should have drilled a few holes on top of the top cap and attached it to that. Then it would have been better. I'll do it next time. I don't really need a 360 view anyway. There is a mountain behind me. The new box is running PoE now. So it has only one cable for data and power. I removed all the radio equipment from the original box. Now it's just a power box. It's much nicer now.

So far I'm really happy with the WRIP's....except for the manual thing.

Repeater Speed:

I've tested the repeater here and I am not having the speed problem this morning. I guess it had something to do with the bandwidth of my ISDN being all used up. My customer is having slow downloads at 2AM though. I rebooted the repeater. Maybe it needed a reboot, because I never rebooted after I moved my servers around and had that other problem on Monday.

New Problem:

So my new problem is that I really need to get my T1 installed. I'm going to have to figure this one out. I don't know if I can get 8 more people online with the current setup. I'm just going to have to put it on the CC and work my butt off to get the required people signed up before my 2nd bill. Thats the only way I see this working out.

I sure hope this WISP works out for me. It's a lot of work and money right now.

The latest problems with the wireless networks...

Very slow download speed through the repeaters. I can only get about 4KB/s through the repeater at Pipers. I have setup my second repeater in my office here to test. So far I had 6KB/s download, but there were a bunch of other people online also. I'll have to test again tonight.

I really blew it today.

I was moving a server rack, so I had to take the whole network off line. I'm thinking that I could move it in like five minutes. Well it turned out to be ten minutes, but that's not the bad thing. After moving the rack and powering up all my systems I thought everything was normal. I didn't get any network alarms. I could surf the web from my workstation. No problems. So I go back to cleaning the rest of my room.

After a while I get a call from a customer that is trying to setup his new hardware. He could not get his web browser to work. Email was working just fine. So I check the systems. I could connect to his bridge, and I could ping his system just fine. I could access the web just fine. I just figured it to be some Windows setup problem.

A few hours later I get a call from Johnny. He could not access the web also. Then I got worried. I started checking all the systems again. I could not figure out what was wrong. I plugged in my wireless laptop and fired it up. I could not access the web from it. Confused at the problem I rebooted my access point. Problem solved. That second I could see about five other customers online accessing different web sites.

I'm thinking that when I powered back up, the AP booted quicker than the server. I guess the AP just didn't set the default route because it could not access it. So now I know to boot the AP's after the server. Weird.

The new network layout is working well. I still need to deploy another repeater on the other side of town. I'm hoping by the end of the week. The new network takes a bit to get used to. I can not longer access all of the network from my workstation. I can access some of it from the server. There is still blind spots. I'll get all the bugs worked out soon though. I need need to get used to all the routing and stuff. For the most part, all my customers are online and things seem to be up and running. If everything runs for a week, I'll sit easier.

Good news! With the advice from Net Nimble I restructured my entire network. I have divided it up into 4 subnets. Set each of the repeaters on it's own subnet and set the server up to route them. It was quite a job, but I've got it set. It seems to be working so far.

I'll know more later in the week.

One thing to note. All the signal strengths with up 20% across the board.

Someone is using my email address to spam 1000's of people. I'm getting all kinds of bounce messages. 100's of them. Stupid spammers. I wish there was something that I could do about it, but as long as people keep buying from them, they will keep messing up the internet.

I got my Net Nimble boxes last night! They are really cool! I'm still trying to figure out how to do layer 3 bridging with them. I didn't get any documentation for them with the boxes. I had to email Net Nimble to get a short “README” file. It helped me get into the admin, but not anything else. I have the box working right now doing NAT. I don't want to do NAT though.

I'm thinking that if I can not do layer 3 bridging with them, then I'll have to do NAT and use a MS PPTP tunnel to a real IP address. I need to give out real IP's because customers like to play games and such. A few of them even want static IP addresses.

It would be cool if I could figure out a way to get WISP-Dist onto these boxes. It has more options, and better control over the hardware. I can't even telnet into these boxes. I'll have to ask about that.

Buying and owning a WRIP from Net Nimble is like buying a car with the hood welded shut, no operators manual, and no keys to start it. It is becoming very hard to figure this out. I didn't even have the IP and password until I emailed Net Nimble for it. I should have known better than to buy from them. They told me that it was proprietary. I should have looked around a bit more and build my own device. The WISP-Dist software seems much more mature and feature rich. If only there was a way to install it on this hardware. I have been searching the net to see how I can install my own copy of Linux on a PC/104 and disc-on-chip. So far I have not found anything. All I wanted was a simple layer 3 bridge to link the two wireless cards together.

I received a email from them telling me to setup the routing and segment off the net work. The problem is that I do not understand their web interface. I don't know what to select. I could easily do this from the Linux command prompt.

I'm still waiting for my Net Nimble stuff. Hopefully it will ship today. I'm really anxious to play with them. I also need to get my network stable. It has been running really well since I changed out the WAP11 at my tower, but with the Net Nimble boxes it should run a lot better (I hope).

I realized today that I may be short one cable for my setup. I'll have to order another one. Then I'll have to climb my tower and pull down the antenna mast at the top to replace the current cable. That may take a few days. I'll have to wait for the weather to get better.