WireLess

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Metropolitan Area Wireless Network

Wireless enthusiasts in many areas are putting up community-run, publicly accessable wireless networks. Seattle Wireless and No Cat are two examples of this. The basic thought is that your own wireless base station is probably reaching farther than your house/apartment/etc., so why not make a bit of it usable to the general public, in the thoughts that if you do it, maybe other people will as well, and you may be able to get random access somewhere else in town. Plus, many semi-decent access points are now virtually free after rebate, so you might as well get one.

The general idea sounds something closely aligned with what the Ames Community Network does, so here's our take on it.

Network Allocation and Node List

The Ames Community Network has glommed on to the network range 10.140.0.0/14 (10.140.0.0 -> 10.143.255.255) from Freenetworks.org. There is nothing that says we have to use this particular range, but high 10. space seems unlikely to be used by home NATing devices, and by co-ordinating with Freenetworks.org we open the opportunity for exciting things like inter-freenet tunnels and we won't have to worry about conflicting IP space.

If/when we want to use it; RFC 4193 IPv6 address space has been selected from /dev/random. The block is FD40:B302:7D80::/48. For the allocation plan see UniqueLocalAllocationPlan.

Layout of Space

The ACN is dividing the four /16 blocks up based on voting wards in Ames. Take out your Voter Registration Card (you are registered to vote, right?) and look for a line that says "Ames Ward N". N is your number. You can also look at these maps or just go here and get your Polling Precinct (look for something like Ames W#P#, the number between W and P is your ward).

The /16 blocks are assigned as follows:

Ward	Block	Range
Ward 1	10.140.0.0/16	(10.140.0.0 -> 10.140.255.255)
Ward 2	10.141.0.0/16	(10.141.0.0 -> 10.141.255.255)
Ward 3	10.142.0.0/16	(10.142.0.0 -> 10.142.255.255)
Ward 4	10.143.0.0/16	(10.143.0.0 -> 10.143.255.255)

If you are outside of an Ames Ward but want to participate anyways, pick the ward closest to the route you would take to get into town. If Ames moves around Wards the next Census, new Nodes will use the new areas but existing Nodes will stay the same.

Each Node takes a /24 of space out of its parent block.

Reserved Space

In each block, the .250.0 -> .255.255 space is reserved for special use, like inter-node connections, or special projects (mobile nodes?).

Node Names and SSIDs

Each Node should have a Node Name that describes it somehow. For example, Node25thAndGrand might be used if you want to describe a location, NodeCityHall if you want to describe a place, and NodeTPROA if you want to be funny. You should make a NodeWhatever page under /WireLess to describe your node: SSID, location, interesting local resources, etc and make that page belong to the category CategoryNodes.

The general idea for SSIDs would be to use ACN-NodeName, so for example NodeTPROA might use the SSID ACN-TPROA.

A recent proposal (that I find to be a good idea) is making the SSID something like "ACN-NODE(Public)" to explicitly indicate that yes, this is a shared and open network.

Current allocations

Ward 1

Ward 2

Ward 3

Ward 4

Localized Resources

Current thinking is to use the faux-TLD .acn for things reachable only by the wireless network. We'll work on DNS one of these days. Each node will have nodename.acn as their local space, and node.acn (i.e. the literal word node followed by .acn) should direct the user to a page of info about the current node (either through local dns munging, or through apache magic of redirecting to a different page based on request ip).

Another question that bears some thought is asking why someone not intersted in the gee-wiz aspects of this network would want to use the network. Of course, if your local node is providing some sort of real internet access through it, people would want to use that. Otherwise there needs to be something to draw people. Possible ideas:

• http://download.wikimedia.org/
• Local newsletters, guides
• Localized info (for example, say your node is in Campus Town. You may want to say "if you can get this signal, this means you are near here. If you look down the street you see $a_place_to_eat, $a_coffee_shop. On this nearby street is $a_post_office, etc."

More Thoughts

The acn-discuss mailing list has some other current thinking, that can be brought over here as needed. Other resources are at GreenerGrass.

Future Useful Things

• Mesh, Nodes, and Ants
• How to build a mesh network with WRT54Gs