Saturday’s field day was a success! The alki group got together around 11:30 and quickly had a link to the folks at magnolia.

The primary form of communication between sites was FRS, which was absolutely horrible. Apparently everyone else could here us fine, but we could barely hear anything, and had to constantly ask the other end to repeat what they said, causing much frustration for everyone involved. For the next field day we are definitely going to consider CB or MURS as an alternative.

I also ran an IRC server on my laptop which worked quite well when my laptop wasn’t randomly disassociating from the network for no apparent reason. When there wasn’t a huge cargo ship in our line of sight, the link to magnolia was good enough to make VoIP calls across the water using a WiFi SIP phone that Casey brought. It was pretty cool to see people from all three sites chatting over a completely “off the grid” network.

A bit later in the day, Ken pointed another antenna around towards downtown and got a ridiculously good connection to some “free Internet while you wait” access point. He advertised it over the mesh so folks at all three sites were able to get online without any additional configuration.

Gasworks fell through due to lack of planning but everyone there eventually relocated to a hill above the Elliott Bay Marina, and managed to join the mesh by linking up to us at alki.

Everyone involved had a great time, and many people expressed interest in doing this more often. Once winter is over, expect to hear about Spring Field Day 2007!

Photos:

• http://pics.caseyhalverson.com/album/10175/all
• http://www.networkoverload.net/photos/swn06fd/
• http://flickr.com/photos/tags/2006fieldday/

From the website:

Field day is a free hands-on, all-day exercise for those interested in
learning about wireless networking and community wireless networks.

We will be setting up a mesh network at three parks around Seattle:
Alki, Magnolia and Gasworks; as well as directional wireless links
connecting them all together. We will be building the network with our
own equipment using readily available open source software such as
GNU/Linux and OLSR, the Optimized Link State Routing protocol.

The configuration will be very similar to that of the SeattleWireless
Network, so if you’ve been interested in joining the network but haven’t
been introduced to all of the tools, this is an excellent opportunity to
come and see how it all works.

There likely will not be Internet access available, but we’re looking to
get a few different projects going as well once the network is up, such
as Voice over IP, and Internet Relay Chat, so be sure to come prepared
with any software or hardware you might want to use!

We recommend downloading OLSR, any wireless tools you might want to try
out, IRC client software, and the likes for other projects you’d like to
get involved in before you come. SIP phones, network cables, power
strips and any power source you may have to power your gear is
specifically encouraged. Be sure to also bring food, rain gear, a chair,
or any other necessities to keep you comfortable during the festivities.

Much more information is available on the wiki page:

http://seattlewireless.net/FieldDay2006

Information specifically about how to about how to get on the network at
field day is available at:

http://seattlewireless.net/FieldDay2006ConfigurationGuide

Hope to see you there!

But why?

Why should anyone invest in creating such a network? If everyone already has a broadband connection to the internet, why do we need something else?

So why support free networking? There have to be an endless number of reasons, but I’d like to start by explaining why I do. My hope is that you can then come up with your own reasons, and help the project grow.

First of all, it’s fast. The latest standard for wireless networking is 54 megabits per second. That’s around 6.75 megabytes per second. In contrast, most people pay around $45 per month for access to a network that’s limited to 4 megabits per second, or 512 kilobytes per second. And wireless networking is only going to get faster. The next wifi standard, known as 802.11n, is currently being finalized, and claims to support a maximum of 540 megabits per second. Even verizon’s new fiber service stops at 50 megabits per second down, and at a mere 5 megabits per second up!

So, we’ve got a fast network, now what can we do with it?
Many things, including access the internet.

Say your grandparents live a few blocks away, and want to be able to use email, instant messaging, and the web. They don’t need an amazing amount of bandwidth, but also can’t stand to be on dialup. The only options right now are overpriced slow DSL, or overpriced fast cable.

But what if you had a wireless link over to their house? You could share out a limited amount of your internet access so they could stay in touch with family for free, and put the would be monthly cost of DSL to better use, such as travel… or what ever else grandparents do these days.

Or maybe you’ve just moved across town. Imagine being able to stick an antenna out your window and instantly be connected to all of your friends, any of which could easily become a gateway out to the internet for you to use, either temporarily until you get settled, or indefinitely. Give your friend half the cost of what you’d pay for DSL/Cable each month, and split the cost of a significantly faster pipe. Community wireless networks are not dependent on the internet, nobody is required to provide internet access, but it gives individuals a new platform to provide access as they see fit, something that is not currently available.

But local content is just as important.

Imagine walking around the city with your laptop, and wherever you happened to stop, you’d be presented with a list of people who live in the area, along with their photos, blogs, podcasts, or any other content that they have created. Or instantly see what restaurants are in the area, or what events are happening that night. But why stop there? Reach out across the network to other neighborhoods and learn about what’s happening over there. All free, all fast.

Free networking has the potential to make this possible.

And much more.

These are some of the reasons why I support community networking.

What are yours?

Tonight we met on Teletubby Hill at Cal Anderson Park, enjoying the sunshine and ripping through some Axis Digital Media Managers that Andy spotted on the way out of Vita.

We didn’t have power (I fear next week’s fixes), but we did have plenty of hardware in a pile, and once chris showed up, chips, dip and drinks. Not great for charging up gear, but great for energizing geekery. We all had a great time out on the grass, and as long as the weather holds up, we’ll be meeting in the park. If it’s rainy/cold/unbearable out, we fall back to Vita.

A few minutes after Matt posted this, someone showed up who had apparently been following the Planet’s rss feed and saw that we were nearby. Not bad.

Hopefully someone will remember to bring a frisbee next time.

Afterwards the remaining seven of us got food at “México Cantina y Veracruz Cooking“.

The goal was to get an entry specified on Rob‘s DNS server to show up in the “Connect to server”dialog in the OSX Terminal application.

The first problem we ran into was figuring out how to specify which domains bonjour will query for services. I swore that OSX had some sort of Bonjour preferences pane somewhere but we absolutely could not find it and decided that it must use the search domains specified for standard DNS resolution. After messing with that for quite a while with absolutely no success, Ken discovered that there is a bonjour preferences pane that lets you set the domains to browse – you just have to download it separately!

With bonjour now configured to query the correct domain the next problem we ran into was getting the correct BIND entries written to announce the service. After much cursing and digging through packet dumps, we finally managed to get the server to show up in the terminal’s connect dialog.

b._dns-sd._udp  IN PTR  @
lb._dns-sd._udp IN PTR  @

_services._dns-sd._udp  IN PTR  _ssh._tcp

_ssh._tcp       IN PTR  mouse-shell-server._ssh._tcp

mouse-shell-server._ssh._tcp    IN SRV 0 0 22 mouse.nocat.net.

However there was a problem, the name showed up but clicking on it did not populate the textbox with any hostname. I configured avahi on my ubuntu linux laptop to browse the domain we were testing (browse-domains in /etc/avahi/avahi-daemon.conf) and ran avahi-discover. The SSH service did show up, but selecting it produced a “Timed Out” error while it attempted to resolve information about the service.

More cursing and packet capturing later we discovered that a TXT record, even if completely empty is required for this to work.

b._dns-sd._udp  IN PTR  @
lb._dns-sd._udp IN PTR  @

_services._dns-sd._udp  IN PTR  _ssh._tcp

_ssh._tcp       IN PTR  mouse-shell-server._ssh._tcp

mouse-shell-server._ssh._tcp    IN SRV 0 0 22 mouse.nocat.net.
mouse-shell-server._ssh._tcp    IN TXT ""

And finally, the terminal was able to discover the ssh server and connect to it.

So, here’s a basic breakdown of what happens when the client queries the server to look for services:

1. Check for a b._dns-sd._udp PTR record to see if this domain is browsable
2. If so, query for any _services._dns-sd._udp PTR records, which will contain PTRs to all the service types publised for this domain.
3. Perform a PTR query for the name of each service type returned by the preveous query, this will return PTRs to SRV records.
4. Do an SRV query and a TXT for every name returned by the preveous query.

According to the video mentioned above bonjour will also query the DNS domain name that is given to you by DHCP, in addition to anything you specify manually, so a practical use for unicast service discovery would be for say a hotel to publish a list of websites containing information about the area for tourists, for example. We weren’t able to come up with any reason that we would ever care to use this ourselves, but were happy to have finally gotten it working.

That said, multicast dns service discovery is absolutely wonderful, and if any of you don’t know have any idea what I am talking about, I highly suggest watching the video.

If you happen to be a Mono/C# developer, you can use Avahi# to add bonjour support to your linux applications, and Mono.ZeroConf to add bonjour support to your osx/windows applications.

This is all most likely explained in the DNS-Based Service Discovery RFC Draft… but who reads those? :)

Assuming you have it installed, just click the link at the bottom of the map.

Thank you Google (Keyhole) for providing documentation on how to create feeds.

This afternoon Matt Westervelt blogged that the node is now live and ready for people to connect to! Lots more information and photos (including a panorama taken by one of the climbers) are avaliable on the wiki page for those of you who are interested. Everyone who has been frequenting HackNights lately hopes that the addition of this node will help bootstrap the network since so much of the city can see it.

I’d also like to metion that I am almost complete with the SeattleWireless Network Map, an interactive map of the network built using the Google Maps API.

If you are in the Seattle area and interested in joining the network, go find yourself on the map and add your location to our database. This way other people wil know that you are thinking about putting up a node, and can get in touch with you to discuss the possibility of setting up a link.

SeattleWireless also has a planet now, which is a great way to keep track of what people involved with the project are up to. If you are interested in wireless networking in general, add Trees Are The Enemy to your RSS reader.

This week CJ kicked off a project to build a community wireless network in Everett, a city outside of Seattle. If you happen to live over there, check it out.

So, contrary to what the New York Times might think, the dream of free networking is far from dead.

Finally, I’d like to congradulate Rob Flickenger and everyone else who worked on the new CreativeCommons licensed book: Wireless Networking in the Developing World, which is now avaliable for download. Unfortunetly it is not avaliable yet in paper form due to slight problems with llulu.

SeattleWireless needs your help to put a wireless node on the Capitol Hill Radio Towers. This node will be able to connect Seattle neighborhoods and can possibly be used for longer distance links as well. It is approximately 550 ft above sea level, and has direct line of sight to Bellevue and Kirkland. Donate now!

This is very exciting. More information at http://seattlewireless.net/fundraiser/.

(Diggable)