NodeGSG is back. Using a surplus access point and NoCat, there is now free (limited) wifi access here. 17 neighbours have found the network and tried to view some websites sofar.

Actually, it's more likely that 17 neighbour laptops have tried to access WindowsUpdate, but got blocked ;-)

External access is shaped to 64/64Kbit using shaperd, so I still keep decent bandwidth for myself and the business. It's also set up to transparently proxy through squid, to keep external bandwidth use to a minimum.

For browsing sites and/or checking webmail it should be dandy this way.

Last week I downloaded a whole bunch of Linux CD and DVD ISOs (CentOS, Mandriva, Ubuntu) to hand out to a bandwidth-unfortunate at the next LUV meeting. These are sitting on one of the machines here and I plan to share those out to whomever wants them.

Last week I set up a falcon repository for some custom Ubuntu Dapper packages I've been making. Today the first useful addition was uploaded, firmware for the bcm43xx driver.

This driver (See blog #110) is now included in Ubuntu kernels by default.

On a related note, so is the driver (and firmware) for my ACX111 based Netgear card. This means I've been able to get rid of ndiswrapper altogether. Yay!

(DHCP now works fine too, btw)

As of yesterday morning, my wife's iBook (running Ubuntu Dapper) is talking to the wireless networks via its Airport Extreme card. This means she can probably run Linux for her talk at Linux.conf.au next week :-)

The default 2.6.15-12 kernel supports WEP, but with a small patch you can make it do WPA! dhcp seems to not work yet, but with a static IP the machine works just dandy.

This patch should apply cleanly to the linux-source-2.6.15 package in Ubuntu. I got it from the mailing list archives on http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/

bcm43xx_wpa.diff