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How to build a Linux-based wireless router out of spare parts (1998)

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Re: How to build a Linux-based wireless router out of spare parts (1998)

#71

Post by dtaht »

gregatragenet3 wrote: post #65

Wow. glad y'all enjoyed that little walk down memory lane. I am still around and still working in tech -- although nowadays work involves poking API's to launch servers and related infrastructure vs. the time that this article was written where someone in my line of work had to drive to the datacenter whenever a server needed an upgrade or became unresponsive. My roommate at the time is still around too, his work is…

Thx for the heads-up greg. Nice to see that old pre-blog entry again. I wrote a 3 and 10 year retrospective of the project here: http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2010/10/who-invented-embedded-l...

I never found out if they settled the case or not... I was quite irked at everyone about a patent that seemed so obvious...

Since then a lot of folk have come out to me about how we ALL were in just those few months, inventing the wifi future. We all invented it together, and you and I wrote enough of our bit down so everyone could invent more.

For those here that don't know my work on bufferbloat, I have kept on fixing wifi, with the outputs of the make-wifi-fast project finally the default in the linux kernel, and fq_codel/sqm/cake also covering the world. https://lwn.net/Articles/705884/

wish it was taking less time for the news and implementations of that to spread than it has.

Re: How to build a Linux-based wireless router out of spare parts (1998)

#73

Post by dtaht »

ram_rattle wrote: post #63

glad that something like openwrt exists, so many people understand the internals of wifi router using this awesome open source software

I wish more understood wifi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb-UnHDw02o&t=1560&themeRefr... enough to help fix it.

Re: How to build a Linux-based wireless router out of spare parts (1998)

#74

Post by dtaht »

shmerl wrote: post #21

Why is situation with wireless routers still so messed up? Barely anything new coming out has proper upstream Linux drivers. Broadcom chipsets are one of the worst offenders, but others are barely any better. Why can't Intel make some?

I have tried to fix the chipsets most used in openwrt. Presently the ath9k is best supported, the mt76 is pretty good, the mt79 coming along, and the ath10k, ok.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb-UnHDw02o&t=1560&themeRefr...

Broadcom can roast in hell.

Re: How to build a Linux-based wireless router out of spare parts (1998)

#75

Post by dtaht »

cubix wrote: post #61
johnklos wrote: post #26

Reminds me of creating a wireless access point using an old 80486 laptop and a ORiNOCO Bronze wireless card, a pigtail and an antenna. It was for one of the first free public wireless networks in Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan, New York, in 2001. The bandwidth was provided by alt.coffee, a coffee and Internet cafe. It took some convincing to get the owners of alt.coffee to let me do this because they thought it wo…

I rigged up something similar in my first corporate job in 2000, plugging an ORiNOCO into the PCMCIA slot of my corporate laptop and a spare at my desk. My boss, an old mainframe guy, was blown away that I could check email during the team meeting in the conference room without going back to my desk. Now wifi is so ubiquitous we don't even think about it.

But we wuz there, first: http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2003/06/wireless-connection.htm...

I wish more thought about making wifi better. It could be so much more awesome now if we just sank more thought and resources into it. https://lwn.net/Articles/705884/

Re: How to build a Linux-based wireless router out of spare parts (1998)

#76

Post by dtaht »

gregsadetsky wrote: post #43
fellowmartian wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, I’m always jealous when I hear these tales of how things used to be here. I came to New York in early 2021 and my experience is completely different - it’s basically 24/7 grind and this kind of hacker fun seems inconceivable now. But maybe I’m just looking in the wrong places.

I feel like https://www.nycresistor.com/ and https://www.nycmesh.net/ still embody the spirit of those early communities!

I love what these folk are doing. also the battlemesh crowd is fun. See guifi for a better model for spreading the internet around...

Re: How to build a Linux-based wireless router out of spare parts (1998)

#77

Post by dtaht »

haroldp wrote: post #62
johnklos wrote: post #26

Reminds me of creating a wireless access point using an old 80486 laptop and a ORiNOCO Bronze wireless card, a pigtail and an antenna. It was for one of the first free public wireless networks in Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan, New York, in 2001. The bandwidth was provided by alt.coffee, a coffee and Internet cafe. It took some convincing to get the owners of alt.coffee to let me do this because they thought it wo…

I love every word in this story. Remember when hacking was joyful ?

:blush: I write these days primarily about bufferbloat and network congestion control (and wifi), and have become more of a BOFH than then: https://blog.cerowrt.org

I really do, still, 25 years later, remember sitting on that roof, in the rain, feeling like the world had shifted into another phase, had transcended somehow.

The future was right there, spreading out in waves from our antenna, and from others. Not part of that story... but later on the woz got service from our downlink fella, also...

Re: How to build a Linux-based wireless router out of spare parts (1998)

#78

Post by dtaht »

throwaway892238 wrote: post #17

I used to build Linux router software that would fit on a floppy disk and run it in a 486DX2, for absolutely no reason except it was fun as hell. Made a nice web UI, packed in a ton of advanced features. Wanted to try and start a company to sell little open source routers, but then I found out cheap routers were quite hard to make money on, so I became a sysadmin instead and mostly browsed Slashdot for 10 years. My b…

I became a musician, and still hack on openwrt. I wish I had managed to make it into the space program, after the spaceshipone launches... Have a song about spacex...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjur0RG-v-I&t=2s

Re: How to build a Linux-based wireless router out of spare parts (1998)

#79

Post by dtaht »

Wonderful to see you all reflecting on that history and sharing your own stories. Fun times! I have a lot of stories from the 80s, for example from the armory geekhouse, where the di-hydrogen-monoxide scare originated...

Greg and I and Everett went on to many greater things. I should probably note it was his gf at the time that first caused me to learn how to solve some of the root causes of bufferbloat - she would run this game that ate our whole 1Mbit connection until wondershaper came along.

I am doing an AMA here, in late march, if you have any questions about what happened to me... or wifi... since 1998.

https://discuss.broadband.money/c/broadband-grant-events/dav...

Re: How to build a Linux-based wireless router out of spare parts (1998)

#80

Post by lukeh »

gregatragenet3 wrote: post #65

Wow. glad y'all enjoyed that little walk down memory lane. I am still around and still working in tech -- although nowadays work involves poking API's to launch servers and related infrastructure vs. the time that this article was written where someone in my line of work had to drive to the datacenter whenever a server needed an upgrade or became unresponsive. My roommate at the time is still around too, his work is…

Ah, wow, a blast from the past! I wrote RFC2307 and {nss,pam}_ldap (which, to be fair, weren't the most robust bits of code, but I was a pretty green C programmer back then).
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