Wireless goodies

Myself and “Ice_Cold” are setting up an AP at TAFE, so we have some decent wireless infrastructure for the growing group of people at TAFE with laptops and/or PDAs with WiFi who are fed up with the TAFE computers. Unfortunately at this time there’s not going to be any Internet, for a few reasons:

• Student’s computers are banned from the TAFE and the Student network now, due to some viruses going around the network. Of course if people don’t use virus-effected OSes... ;)
• If we did connect it to the internet, there would be a lot of l33ching, which is bad for the honest people on the network who just want to surf the net, get their email, etc.

The network should be up by sometime on Tuesday officially. It’ll have a DHCP server and a IRC server, so people can chat and stuff on the wireless, without using PopMessenger, which is a bit dodgey IMO. There’s not going to be any game servers (it’s TAFE, you’re here to study, and there’s no 4CoD subject) and no public-use fileserver, because we don’t have the money to pay for this stuff. All the hardware we’re using is spare recycled stuff, if you want more and better equipment, give us money and/or hardware. However if you want to give us hardware, consult us first.

The main ideas behind it is to help promote wireless networking (and as I call it, the “internet on the toilet” philosophy), wireless security, and maybe even get a better, externally funded wireless network going that spans the campus.