It shipped! Woohooo!

I did it. I bought the Net Nimble repeaters. $600 each. I ordered two repeaters and one WISP router.

So far they are exactly what I wanted. There is the ability for me to upgrade them later down the road if I wanted to. I'll wait for the warranty to run out first. I should be able to upgrade the back haul to 802.11g when Linux drivers are available.

I totally recommend Net Nimble for wireless stuff. Kelly was very helpful when I was researching the product. They have good prices on other stuff as well. Check out their web site: NetNimble.net.

I was messing around with Omniweb and found at it has type ahead find for link! This is something that Mozilla has, and I really like it.

Omniweb Rules!

Omniweb 4.5. It's now my default browser. It has everything I need and want. It just works like a web browser should work. It still crashes a lot, but it's a early beta software. Even though, it does not crash as much as Safari Beta 2. One of the things I like the most about Omniweb is the user interface. It's just done right. When you hover over a link the URL shows up in the URL bar, exactly where it should. I have my cookies set to reject by default. Then I setup rules to allow the cookies from the sites I use cookies at. No more asking me via pop up for every site like in Mozilla based browsers. The status bar at the bottom hides when the browser is not downloading pages. Very nice. The tool bar is a standard Mac OS X tool bar. That means it's configurable. I like it. There are a whole lot of other small features that I like about Omniweb, but it would take all day to write them down. For $30 you can't lose.

I am having a terrible time with my network. Starting yesterday my wireless went on the fritz. I can't connect to my repeaters. People on the repeaters can't connect to the internet. It's like it just blew up. The one giving me the most problems is POP1. It's a dual WAP11 setup. I really need to get rid of it. Linksys is really pissing me off.

Yesterday I found a dual radio repeater at Netnimble.net. I'm still waiting for the full spec. on it. If it's what I think it is, then I'm going to buy it. It's $599 with the two radios. It would cost me the same if I wanted to build my own. I'm hoping that it's a Linux system that I can hack on. If it's not, then I'm gong to build my own. I found an embedded board for $260. I'll have to buy the two radios at $75 each. Then I'll have to build all the cabling and power supply. It may end up just a bit more than the Netnimble one, but I'll be able to hack on it.

I have my full size PC to use, but I'm not sure I want to go that way. Too many moving parts in it. I guess I'll put it up for now until I can decide on the other one. If I hear back from them today, then I might order one tonight. I'm not sure yet.

I'm still trying to get quotes on hardware. I'm currently looking for a 100MHz x86 type system with two PCMCIA slots and a compact flash card reader. I've been looking at embedded PCs that run Linux. If I can find something small that runs on 9VDC then I can build my repeaters from that. I could even sell them to other wireless people. I'm thinking of putting it into a small plastic, water tight case. I want to mount N bulkhead connectors to the outside that connect to the PCMCIA cards. It could run 802.11(a|b|g) cards as long as there are Linux drivers. There could be different configurations like Dual Access Point, Repeater, or Bridge. Just swap the PCMCIA cards with different things. It can all run off of a 16MB Compact Flash card.

My repeater is working! I have been testing a new repeater solution for the last few days. I have a Linux box setup with two wireless radios in it. One is connecting to my main access point for the back haul. The other is the access point for the repeater. I have it setup to test the connection. If the connection goes down, then it resets the wireless card. If it still can not make a connection it reboots the system. No more having to drive out and reset repeaters! I'll also be able to run stats on the Linux box and upload them to my web server. I'll be able to ssh into the box to do repairs without having to go onsite. The only problem that I have so far is the power usage. I would like to run it from battery power, but a PC power supply uses too much. I also have a hard drive in it. I would really like to find a very small PC with a compact flash for storage and two PCMCIA slots. Then I can install Linux on the compact flash and install two radio cards. I would like to have the system run from 12VDC as well. I have been searching the internet for such a creature. There should be something like it available. I only need about 100MHz processor and 16-32MB ram. Anyway, my search continues.

I'm finally feeling better. That flu was the worse. About as bad as Christmas 2001. I went a whole year without getting sick, so I guess it was just saved up. I'm just glad it was not SARS. ;-)

I finally got my Linux based repeater working. With the help of Jiri Fojtasek and the hostap mail list I installed a program called parprouted. It forwards the ARP requests from interface to interface. Like a bridge, but for wireless radio cards. I'm going to do a bit more testing on it and then set it up as a repeater at Pipers. I'll have to build a new box for it to be put in. It's a lot bigger than the current one. I'll be able to write scripts to reset the wireless cards if anything goes wrong with them. The next thing to do it find a 12vdc power supply for it so I can put it at Johnny's place running on battery.

I'm testing out the sneaky peek version of Omniweb and I've got to say, WOW! I have only used it for a few minutes and already I love it. It renders all my favorite sites perfectly (so far) and it does the with the quickness. Safari only wishes it was this good. A lot of the things I really dislike about Safari are fixed in Omniweb. This is only a sneak peek of what it's going to be, but already it's kicking some major butt.

Lets just say that I will purchase this version when it is released!

A new version of Apple's Safari is out. This time its the worse version yet. It crashes so much, its crazy. I don't know if it's my preferences, or if it's the application. If I go to my home page, it just locks up. When I try to open a javascript pop-up window it crashes. I even had it lock up when trying to change the font size. The first version that was released was I think the best. This one is about twice as slow as Camino. I'll just stick with Camino for now.

Oh yeah, I'm still sick.