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Entries in opensource (2)

Wednesday

24Jun2009

Open-Mesh.com Review - create a wifi mesh for your business / neighbourhood

Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 12:35PM

I started testing Open-Mesh around half way through 2008, as part of an investigation for a wifi network a client could install for a building development they were doing.

What I was looking for was something similar to Meraki, but with a lower price point. I stumbled across a new open source development that started out as disgruntled Meraki users (from what I could tell) that didn't like the price hikes.

No frills Open-Mesh Mini RouterI went ahead and ordered 2 Open-Mesh basic routers. These were under $50US, but landed in Canada, with tax and UPS "handling" fees, ended up around $150CAN. All you have to do is hook these puppies up, at least one wired into your network, and the other just needs to be with-in wifi signal distance. From there, you log into the open-mesh.com web based control panel and setup your wifi mesh.

Unfortunately for the first 6 months or so, the firmware was very flakey on the original router hardware. There has been a new hardware revision that has since been released that features temperature and power spike awareness and recovery, but on the current firmware everything seems very stable now, no long requiring a manual power cycle to get the mesh back up and running. Thankfully, firmware updates are silently pushed out to the routers.

At least one of the routers needs to be wired - the rest just need to be in mesh wifi rangeI have yet to play around with the captive portal options, but there are now many options if you wish to advertise, or collect payment for access to your wifi mesh. The ability to limit the maximum upload/download speeds is great so that your mesh users don't nail your internet link. The other feature is that it will isolate the network traffic from your internal network, so there isn't a way for the users to snoop around on your LAN subnet.

Overall, nice product at the right price point!

Update on Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 4:12PM by

Victor Hong

http://www.engadget.com/2009/07/14/fonera-2-0n-available-adds-media-sharing-shared-storage/

Things are getting interesting in this space...

Thinstation + Terminal Server + old hardware = recession IT solution

Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 9:27AM

I have one client that has most users connecting to a Terminal Server. This means that desktop support is generally a non event. As time goes on, I have found a workstation here and there has died, power supply gone or dead hard disk.

This client had plenty of Pentium III and Pentium 4 machines lying around, and what better way to save them some bucks, than to rebirth them, as hard disk less thin clients that boot off a CD, and connect straight up to the Terminal Server! Welcome to a simple opensource solution - Thinstation!

Vintage Compaq Deskpro - Pentium III - blazing fast with ThinStation!We went with a simple setup, practically everyone in that client's office uses a resolution of 1024 x 768. So we created an image, with that resolution set, and added the details of the 2 terminal server they have running on the network - that would appear on the menu when you boot up.

All I do, is burn off a bunch of these CDs, rip out the hard disk from the old workstations, set the BIOS to boot from the CDRom, and away we go. The CD boots into Thinstation in under a minute, the user then selects the terminal server they wish to use, and BAMM, they are instantly presented with the Terminal Server login screen!