On Tue, 6 Jan 1998 22:53:38 -0000, you wrote:
>first. I live in Lancashire, England BTW. Anyway, on to the questions:
Can you not get to the existing wormhole in that region? Though, even
with that said, I am a firm believer in re-inventing the wheel cos
it's fun!
>The main thing, as I mentioned in my previous post, is that I am not as yet
>sure whether it is possible to get internet access via a Linux box
>connected to the IPX network we have at college, as it seems to be using
>some kind of proprietory IP->IPX tunneling software. Does a machine
>connected to such a thing still have a real IP address of its own? I may
>try installing a minimal Linux installation on one of the PCs at college,
>and having a play around with it (I didn't know it would crash the entire
>college network sir... :)
I don't know a great deal about IPX, but figure that Novell servers do
some weirdo encapsulation IP routing for their clients (or did I dream
it up?). Be careful of installing a Linux box in to an Novell
dominated network if you install the 'netware emulator' for Linux....
we did that a year or two ago and the damn thing took on the identity
of an existing campus server supporting 200 odd users at the time...
needless to say the screams were heard from miles away :-)
>Would it be possible to set up the gateway machine as a POP mail server,
>with accounts for all the users on the network?
Yep, with ease.
> I'm a little confused about
>the legal aspect- surely anything sent over the internet is being relayed
>at several points by servers run by non-hams? Would it be illegal if
>non-hams could put data on the gateway machine (i.e. Email), and hams
>downloaded it to their own machines via either POP or telneting into their
>account on the gateway themselves?
The law is a grey (gray) area in the UK on such systems. I think as
far as the telecoms act goes, if you are doing ham<->ham traffic only
using the internet as a 'pipe' then you are ok if the carriers are
licensed PTOs. As far as the ham licence goes, only a ham can key your
radio or cause it to be keyed, so for example if an email was sent to
you by dcojh.opwi@mx.dy.fi and he was not a ham, and your box
allowed that to be sent over the ham bands then you are breaking the
law. However, with some lateral thinking there are ways around
that..... funny how I have forwarded 'text' from my daytime callsign
to my evening time callsign over packet :-) Oh yes, get a club call
for the college machine, in the UK it is illegal to talk to yourself.
>In order to persuade the college to let me put a gateway on their network,
>I need to write a full technical report of why it would be benificial to
>the college, in particularly why it would be 'educational'. Any
>suggestions? Has anyone else already done such a beast I could base mine
>on?
It will only be beneficial to the college if it aids a club/society
that gives the students/staff more incentive to be happy bunnies and
work well at other times! It would be educational for you in terms of
setting it up. However, be sure that your local users realise that it
is something that YOU are doing and not a college system, I've heard a
story of someone coming close to losing their job due to whinging
radio hams complaining to his employer on whos site a gateway system
was located.
>Is a 386 slc 16 (not quite sure about that speed) with 4Mb of RAM and an
>80Mb (or was it 40?) hard drive sufficient? My guess is that the processor
>would be fast enough, and there would be enough disk space, but I'm not
>sure if 4Mb would be enough RAM. I have run Linux on a 486DX266 with 4Mb of
>RAM before and it did not seem too bad, but it was only being used single
>user, no networking.
It'll work, but scrap it and shell out a ton and get a 486 machine
with at least 8 megs of ram and 300 megs of disk to be useful. When
you start with Linux, you never stop, you'll always want to be
configuring something, tweaking something else - just to see what
happens!
>I was thinking the best way to set up the service would be to give whoever
>wants to use the service a shell account on the gateway so they can telnet
>in and do things from there, as well as having an Email account and stuff
>like that. Is that the best way to go?
I think the best way to go is to forget logins to the box, just do
HAM<->HAM TCPIP routing, maybe do some AXIP (to allow netrom nodes and
stuff like that for the older generation of hams), do DNS (you'll soon
see why!), do convers. Don't allow non ampr.org emails. Getting access
to the internet via telephone modem is a lot lot cheaper than running
packet in the long run I reckon, keep amateur radio special and
slightly distinct from the internet if you can.
>What about the licensing aspect? Do you need to apply for some kind of
>special station license as a club or something?
You need a group of you to get together and get a club callsign.
You'll need to have a couple or three people who can gain 24 hour
access to shut the radio(s) down in case of national emergency (or
more likely, radio faults). This means you'll have to be on good terms
with your security people, or have access rights anyway.
>Thanks a lot, Alex.
Best of luck getting it all going..... congrats on getting the
licence, I remember when I got mine, the first thing I did was send a
packet to get an IP number from that chap who puts his name as the
author of the Linux kernel AX25 nowadays :-)
73, G7PIT
-- David J Brown 07010 70 9001