Southampton Open Wireless Network

Southampton Open Wireless Network

www.sown.org.uk

Talk outline

• Aims of SOWN

• Technical Outline

• Campus nodes

• Servers

• SOWN[at]HOME nodes

• What would I have to do?

• How to get involved

• Any questions?

Southampton Open Wireless Network

www.sown.org.uk

Aims of SOWN

• To provide free internet for ECS and other university students and the general public

• City wide wireless coverage, creating a ‘Community Area Network’

• Internet and SOWN network access covering all useful areas such as pubs, university etc.

• Explore new technologies such as IPv6, multicast ... Anything you want!

Southampton Open Wireless Network

www.sown.org.uk

Technical – On campus

• Originally three on campus nodes, back links using 802.11a, this is now replaced with the SOWN VLAN (over ISS Ethernet)

• Currently: SUSU node (on a pole on the West Refectory building) running

• Zepler with 802.11a (and soon b as well)

• Run embedded PCs with Voyage Linux/OpenWRT

• High powered (>400mw) miniPCI wifi cards

Southampton Open Wireless Network

www.sown.org.uk

Technical – Servers• Rack mount servers located in building

32 (EEE)

• sown-auth – runs web server and database for nodes and users, and sends out config and other services related to this. Lots of very important stuff on here

• sown-vpn – responsible for all the vpn tunnels and also VPN into and out of SOWN VLAN, and Nagios network monitoring

• sown-nat – allows access to the internet for users of the on campus nodes and for all machines to update online etc. Also runs SNMP and cacti to make pretty graphs

Southampton Open Wireless Network

www.sown.org.uk

Technical – More Servers!

• Servers in Zepler (also used to back up other servers)

• sown-6core – IPv6 router for SOWN

• sown-vpn2 – Development server for testing

• Used for testing, before rollouts on main servers (e.g: Nagios)

Southampton Open Wireless Network

www.sown.org.uk

Technical – SOWN[at]HOME

• Wireless access points to give out to users with no/minimal config necessary to allow SOWN access to be broadcast from users house

• Just plug it in to a free network port on your router and switch on!

• Makes use of home ADSL line for internet access

• Tunnels are set up to sown-vpn so SOWN network access is granted.

• User authentication is passed down tunnel to sown-auth

• Nodes are from Meraki, but flashed with OpenWRT (linux distro for home routers) and then configured to work with SOWN

Southampton Open Wireless Network

www.sown.org.uk

What SOWN needs:• ENTHUSIASTIC PEOPLE!

• You don’t need to be an expert to begin with

• Continual improvement of the web interface for users and admins

• Design and backend

• Firmware updates

• Package management and configs

• Security

• Long distance wireless

• Deployment of new technologies: multicast, VoIP etc...

• Make SOWN bigger and better than ever before!

• If you are not so technically minded we have other jobs such as wiki overhaul and documentation

Southampton Open Wireless Network

www.sown.org.uk

SOWN Semester 2

• 802.11a – more long range testing

• Multicast – SOWN TV?

• VoIP – Internal phone in your home

• 802.1x – Wireless security

• IP Mobility – Roaming services

Southampton Open Wireless Network

www.sown.org.uk

Buzzwords/Technology:

Wiki

iptables

Firmware

Web2.0

OpenWRT

Voyage LinuxIEEE802.11 alphabet

VLAN

Shell scripting

Apache

PHP

MySQL

Debian

LDAP

IPv6

Multicast

VoIP

RADIUSSNMP

Nagios

Cacti

RIP OSPF

ZebraDHCP

DNS

OpenVPN

SSL

SSHQuagga

PIMD

Southampton Open Wireless Network

www.sown.org.uk

Get Involved

• Put a home node in your house!

• www.sown.org.uk

• #sown on irc.sown.org.uk (Webcentre IRC server)

• Email list

• Weekly meetings (and occasional ‘surgery’ days at the weekend for the extra keen)

• Chat to us now!

www.sown.org.uk

Many thanks to:

• Les Carr and Tim Chown

• David Tarrant

• James Morse

• Dave Newman

• Andrew Willmott

• Nick Humfrey

• Colin Williams

• Many others, apologies if I have left you off!