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 university students and the general public

• City wide wireless coverage

• Coverage of useful areas such as Pubs and student areas

• Play with shiny equipment and technology like WiMAX and IPv6!

Southampton Open Wireless Network

www.sown.org.uk

Technical – On campus

• Originally SOWN was an ad-hoc Mesh network

• Now we have some campus nodes which use iSolutions’ network to talk to the Internet and the rest of SOWN

• Currently there is one high powered node working atop of SUSU

• Run embedded PCs with Voyage Linux or 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 – does what it says on the tin – This server is our authentication server for Web Redirect and 802.1x. We are directly peered with University login servers and through them to eduroam

• sown-vpn – Responsible for handling back-haul links from remote nodes so that they can talk to auth

• 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

• sown-6core – IPv6 router for SOWN

• sown-7core – More IPv6 development. This server is currently used for Mobile IPv6 testing in ECS and SOWN

• sown-dev – Development server for testing of new technologies. Interesting things like Voice over IP are running on this box

Southampton Open Wireless Network

www.sown.org.uk

Technical – SOWN[at]HOME

• Plug’n’Play wireless access points to allow SOWN access to be broadcast from users house with the minimum of fuss

• 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 the tunnel to sown-auth

• Nodes are made by Meraki, but run with our own flavour of OpenWRT (linux distribution for home routers) which is 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

• You can do as much or as little as you like

• You want to do something cool and new? Tell us and we can probably help!

We are continually improving the web interface for users and administrators

• Firmware updates

• Package management and configuration

• Security

• We have just spent this summer researching Wireless Security and rolling it out on SOWN

• Long distance wireless research (802.11a and WiMAX)

• Deployment of new technologies: multicast, VoIP, Mobile IPv6 etc…

Southampton Open Wireless Network

www.sown.org.uk

SOWN Part 2

What are we currently researching?

• WiMAX – we are shortly going to be the second city in the UK with this bleeding edge technology

• Multicast – SOWN TV?

• VoIP – Internet phone in your home

• IP Mobility – ECS and Janet UK are currently developing services in this area. SOWN is integral to this research!

Southampton Open Wireless Network

www.sown.org.uk

Buzzwords/Technology:

Wiki

iptables

Firmware

Web2.0

OpenWRT

Voyage LinuxIEEE802.11

VLAN

Bash

Apache

PHP

MySQL

Debian

LDAP

IPv6

Multicast

VoIP

RADIUSSNMP

Nagios

Cacti

RIP OSPF

ZebraDHCP

DNS

OpenVPN

SSL

SSHQuagga

PIMD

WiMAX

RIPng

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 (hosted by ECS)

• Email list

• Weekly meetings (and occasional ‘surgery’ days at the weekend for the extra keen) (information on these is available on the web site)

• 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!