Cisco gear is great, rugged (heck 1watt through-hole resistors are never argued with right?)

One thing to keep in mind is power usage.

I think the average consumption is 60w on a Cisco Switch by my last memory. 

That said the ruggedness of the Cisco gear is probably more likely to survive any local issues than a home quality device.

I actually had a Cisco router short out, smoke a few circuits, reboot, disable the port, and 3 weeks later when I decided to clean it I realized the smoke I smelt and the internet reboot was actually the router after I checked  the router configs before shutdown.

Just something to think about if you need the node to run on emergency power.

So, I am a bit unique in some regards.

The only wireless device I have at the moment that I use at my house is actually an iphone (ignore the mesh nodes they are all wired up as well)

In my case I do the static routes as needed to access the mesh nodes.  I never force them to be saved however so every reboot they go away.

I also do a lot of multi-homing where I have a single computer with 2 network ports plugged into my global network and my mesh network.  This is a bit of an 'advanced' setup however and I wouldn't expect to see many people use this.  This involves a 2nd interface and static routes.

Static routes while more work when you need them, would limit the amount of traffic that could go over the mesh when it is plugged into your network to only that device

I woudl be worried about viruses which love to scan wide segments  and if trying to go against 10.x  could manage to spread to other systems in the network (I remind everyone again treat the mesh as insecure)

Really it becomes a matter of choice on how you want to setup your network, what risks you are willing to accept, etc.

If my commands are correct the below should give you the WAN port on EVERY port of the switch (aka plug your local network into any port)   except for those ports that you use the interface command on to change over to handle bbhn traffic.

Cisco switches are nice, but they take a lot of knowledge to understand in, I suggest research what each of these command s do to understand what your being asked to setup.

#Enables administrative mode
enable
<you may have to enter a password here>

#Setup the vlan database:
vlan database
vlan 10 name "BBHN Network"
vlan 2 name "BBHN DTDLINK"
exit

#Enable configuration mode
conf t
# Assuming Interface 23 on module 0 is what you want to configure to be the port the BBHN node plugs into: -- puts the interface into a trunking mode.

interface FastEthernet0/23
switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q
switchport mode trunk
switchport trunk native vlan 10

# repeat the above for each bbhn port changing the number to to the correct interface

# You can add a vlan 11,12,13 etc if you want to get advanced to have the "lan" port of each device on its own vlan if you need to mix and match but this is another subject.

exit

exit

#save the configuration to the startup config so when you reboot the switch it sticks around

copy running-config startup-config

* DISCLAIMER * I have not tested the above commands -- Any configuration is at your own risk.

All,

I have read the 2-3 posts here that talk about the requirement for a managed switch that supports 802.1q off the back of a Ubiquiti unit, if you want to talk to the WAN (internet gateway). In my case a Bullet M2 HP.

I have in my possession a Cisco 2950-24 managed switch. It is a layer 2 switch that supports 802.1q on its configured vlans.

The problem I have is that CLI is the most obtuse configuration methodology I have ever seen. Not that I haven't been studying, I have. I'm just not sure I'll get smart on this in a reasonable period of time.

Is there someone out there who is smart on this stuff who could lend me a helping hand? I'd sure appreciate it.

73,

Chuck...

WB6YOK

Wade, What are the first characters of your router's serial number?

Thanks Conrad. I believe I understand now. We have a small group here and we are all learning as we go. I may be back asking more questions soon.

Ted WB2LOU

State College, PA

Mission accomplished, BBHN is now running on my Linksys.

I tried rewriting the linux partition using mtd with both the stock Linksys and BBHN bin files, no joy.  With the ddWRT bin file it worked as advertised.  It's not about filesize, the BBHN is actually smaller than the other two bin files.  The router rebooted with ddWRT and from from its' admin page I could install BBHN.

I don't know what the difference is between these bin files nor why you can't install BBHN from OpenWRT but you can from ddWRT, but suffice it to say that it's possible to get there from here but not directly.  Hopefully this thread can help out the next guy who wants to get from OpenWRT to BBHN. 

Thanks for nudging me along with this.

Mark K5LXP

Albuquerque, NM

Please reffer to the following datasheet

http://dl.ubnt.com/datasheets/bulletm/bm_ds_web.pdf

Actual power output depends on how good a signal path the device has to the device it is contacting and is limited to he max configured power in the user interface.

Unlike a typical 2m radio where RF power can fluctuate based in power source (VIN is tied directly to the RF amplifier) these devices have a built in Switch Mode Power Supply (SMPS) and all circuits are belived to be behind this supply so they should receive a constant voltage supply to operate at the intended paramaters.

The built in components have to be highly linear so they would not react well of this wasn't the case. 

 I would suggest closing your browser and re opening as a start to make sure nothing is cached in it's memory. If that doesn't work try a full cache clean on your browser.

Top Link LED should be on solid -  this signifies the router has completed booting.

Ok, so the first bullet I did, everything went fine. The second bullet loaded up the firmware fine, but will not save the ssid or password when I tell it to. It also stays on the 192.168.1.1. Any ideas?

I also noticed that the top led (on the signal strength) is on.

EDIT: Nevermind, it was a case of the browser being stupid.

So the issue with this is that a node can only operate in one mode at a time.

The wireless interface on the Linksys is dedicated to the mode you choose.  Normaly this will be MESH which allows the node to be used as a mesh device.

To provide services as an Access Point a different mode exists in the interface. Normally you will put a Mesh Node and an Access point together if you want wifi access locally to the mesh (Make sure the wifi device is on a channel as far away from the mesh node as possible)

Even if a node could run an Access Point and a Mesh Node at once you would have bigger issues of RF pollution.   The mesh node antennas would likely be outdoors, aimed away from the users (towards another mesh node) and any time you wanted to send a packet to another local laptop it would have to flood the RF link for many miles for a packet to just go a few feet.  This just doesn't make good RF sense. It would be similar to using 80m 100w HF rig to talk 200 feet away when VHF/UHF handheld would do much better

NOTE: by setting up your main router to forward all 10.x packets to the mesh you will be allowing any device that connects to your network to send out data.  One must be espcialy careful that random devices do not attempt to send content that would not be in compliance with Amateur Radio regulations.

What you are trying to do is actually much more of a DD-WRT question than it is a BBHN question because it relates to configuring your router rather than the mesh node. The documentation on the DD-WRT site will likely be able to provide much more detailed information than this short snippit should you require more details.

1) DD-WRT router would need a static route to 10.x to point towards the mesh node IP address on the interface the mesh node is connected.

2) DD-WRT would need its dns server configured to forward queries to the mesh node:

http://cybernetnews.com/local-internal-dns-ddwrt/

http://www.thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/docs/setup.html

"Using special servers.

Dnsmasq has the ability to direct DNS queries for certain domains to specific upstream nameservers. This feature was added for use with VPNs but it is fully general. The scenario is this: you have a standard internet connection via an ISP, and dnsmasq is configured to forward queries to the ISP's nameservers, then you make a VPN connection into your companies network, giving access to hosts inside the company firewall. You have access, but since many of the internal hosts aren't visible on the public internet, your company doesn't publish them to the public DNS and you can't get their IP address from the ISP nameservers. The solution is to use the companies nameserver for private domains within the company, and dnsmasq allows this. Assuming that internal company machines are all in the domain internal.myco.com and the companies nameserver is at 192.168.10.1 then the option server=/internal.myco.com/192.168.10.1 will direct all queries in the internal domain to the correct nameserver. You can specify more than one domain in each server option. If there is more than one nameserver just include as many server options as is needed to specify them all."

Where the server line is something like "server=/local.mesh/nodeipaddress"     --- all DNS access would have to be done as http://nodename.local.mesh for this to work

My first Linksys firmware upgrade went perfectly for me.

However I am told that there can be no WIFi access point now. I thought I read that it is possible but I can find no article about that.

Having wireless access to the node is important when a LAN connection is not practical.

Thanks

Ted, WB2LOU...an entry level nubee!!