After listening to Ron's (N1AHH) excellent seminar on emergency communications ( http://griddowncomms.blogspot.com/ } at the 2014 Amateur Radio Quartzfest in Quartzsite, a number of retired hams that "nest" here for the winter months decided to try meshin' around. Other than Quartzfest, the "Q" is for the most part, an RF ghost town.
Collectively, we have very little networking experience and a sprinkling of Linux but we somehow managed to muddle though and get a mesh up and running. There nine modes currently on line.
We have IRC up thanks to Rusty's (AE5AE) tutorial, a couple of IP cameras, and few Puppy Linux servers running on surplus Neoware and HP Thin clients purchased on eBay.
The thin clients make ideal portable servers and terminals because consume little power and run on 12VDC because they are entirely solid state (no hard drive). They are available in both embedded XP and linux flavors. We picked up a couple of them on eBay for $18 ea. delivered.
VOIP is next.
Attached is an image to the Q-Mesh
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