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This past Sunday I spent the day with Xarion and Hooligan at the Jawug Highsite (HS) at Grand Central.

We replaced the current Mikrotik RB133 which served a dish antenna link to TrustBank HS, Panel to me! (LSD) and grid to Pretoria PWP network (jankemp). For some reason the GC-TB radio was faulty and had to be replaced, and we were never able to scan PWP.

The replacement was a Pentium-3 PC with PCI riser card which now holds 4 radios. GC-TB, GC-LSD (new sector), GC-PWP (24dbi grid) and GC-PTAWUG (27dbi grid).

All went well except for the PTAWUG connection as we were unable to scan them. We will do more realignment and check again. We however did manage to scan PWP, so Jawug offically joins PWP (Pretoria).

On an extra sad note, the system ran for about 3 hours and Xarion rebooted it and it didnt come back up. We hope to go though to GC today and see if we can see the problem. Hopefully just needs another reboot.

As far as lessons learnt, I would def recommend putting the radio's in the PC and enabling them before dragging the PC up the tower!

Thanks to Hooligan and Xarion for the hard work keeping jawug up and running!

http://www.wug.za.net/
http://www.jawug.za.net/
http://www.lsd.co.za/

So it looks like finally Xarion, Silver and myself are heading to Grand Central (GC).

My routerboard is still broken, and keeps rebooting, gonna take it back to Miro tomorrow.

My scan of GC side shows

Flags: A - active, B - bss, P - privacy, R - routeros-network, N - nstreme
ADDRESS SSID BAND FREQ SIG NF SNR RADIO-NAME
AB R 00:0B:6B:80:A3:7C 5ghz 5180 -89 -10 15
AB R 00:0B:6B:37:46:CC fire-castle-pp 5ghz 5240 -82 -10 22 castle
AB R 00:0B:6B:35:FE:5F 5ghz 5240 -67 -10 37 Midrand4
AB R 00:02:6F:23:11:CE castle-midrand-pp 5ghz 5260 -89 -10 15 midrand1
AB R 00:0B:6B:35:FE:65 5ghz 5300 -91 -10 13 Midrand4
ABPR 00:80:48:47:63:6E Main1 5ghz 5320 -92 -10 12 00804847636E
AB RN 00:0C:42:0C:08:1A Matumi_Link 5ghz 5805 -86 -10 18 iJuice_Wireless_

Rumor has it though Midrand4 is on the same tower where jawug should be. So i've kinda aligned for that.

Guess we'll see later.

I've been part of jawug (http://www.jawug.za.net) for quite a while now. Basically its a community wireless network based on 802.11 standards.

After jawug, there was another community formed wug (http://www.wug.za.net) whose aim was to provide a common place for all wugs (wireless user groups) from around South Africa (and even Namibia) to communicate and coordinate.

If you are interested in joining a wireless community network, visit the two sites and read about it. Its really great, because essentially you have a big LAN and people have resources available on the network. The guys run email servers, web servers, ftp servers. Things like an asterisk server for SIP phone calls between the nodes and irc servers. Bittorrent trackers. The possibilities are really endless! Not to mention the game servers (counter strike, warcraft3 - and any game you want to play!) and of course all the series and movies you want to download! soo, anyways, its a great bunch of people who have a great bunch of movies :)

I used to run a 3 way node about a year ago. I was a master and Ivan, dorris and Silver were connecting to me. Recently, there has been a HS (High Site) put up at Grand Central and I am pretty sure I will be able to see it. It runs on 5.8ghz range.

I got my 5.8 equipment (hot routerboard 333) and a 27dbi grid. Although I cant see Grand Central. There may actually be a problem with the sector / radio at Grand Central and we will be checking that hopefully this weekend.

The bottom line is, once i'm connected to the Grand Central HS (its about a 12km link). I will be in the jawug backbone, as Grand Central connects to Kempton Park with the HS on the Trust Bank building.

I also have a 2.4 patch which i will let people connect to me if they are in the lonehill, sunninghill, paulshof area. Basically anyone that can see me can connect and join the Jawug backbone.

So thats my news. I'll let you know when we fix Grand Central and hopefully i see it!