From: John Ackermann (zsoyc.dzjnv@mailit.tunk.net)
Date: Sun Jan 02 2000 - 17:56:31 EET
The recent Y2K non-event gave me the impetus to finish a project I'd
been working on for a few months, and it's something that others on
this list who are involved in public service activities might be
interested in.
I've put together what I call a "network in a bag" for emergency use.
It's an old laptop (486SX/50, 16MB RAM, 250MB disk) with PCMCIA modem
and ethernet cards, long telephone cable, an ethernet mini-hub, and a
bunch of network drop cables.
The laptop has Linux installed and ppp configured to dial in to my home
network, which then provides access to the Internet (others might use a
separate ISP account, hopefully with a static IP address). The kernel
is configured for IP masquerade and the dhcpd daemon is running to
provide a class C network on the ethernet side. The laptop has apache,
sendmail, and samba installed as well.
With this setup, in about 10 minutes I can network a bunch of Windows
PCs and provide them Internet access as well as a local mail server and
file/print sharing via Samba. The web server allows public access to
status information if that becomes necessary.
At the moment, I don't have AX.25 configured, but that's the next step.
The only problem I forsee is that my laptop doesn't have 16550 UARTs
on its serial ports, and both PCMCIA slots are being used, so
high-speed access may be a problem. But a 1200 baud radio link into an
internet-connected convers server would still be a useful tool.
It turns out we didn't need this for Y2K (thankfully) but it seemed to
impress the folks in the war room where I was stationed.
Just something to think about...
73,
John N8UR
cnersqv.woqcrvpn@mx.dy.fi
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Jan 02 2000 - 17:59:58 EET