-
Join the MyBroadband community
South Africa’s biggest forum. Discuss, discover, and connect with thousands of members.
-
Question of the Day: How do you normally pay for purchases in stores?
frozt01100101
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Jul 23, 2007
- Messages
- 276
- Reaction score
- 0
A free-to-use community-run network where you don't pay the Telkom Tax for being able to do any sort of network traffic to your buddy staying but a few kilometers from you.
Ok, was kidding about warez, but running a mirror of Tucows/Simtel.net would be cool too 
.
Maybe even an English Wikipedia (as one can get it on DVD, wonder if one could access it over
a link from a DVD).
.Maybe even an English Wikipedia (as one can get it on DVD, wonder if one could access it over
a link from a DVD).
Kloon
Expert Member
kom kom waars die capies? Ons het 'n ou netwerkie in die kaap ook!
frozt01100101
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Jul 23, 2007
- Messages
- 276
- Reaction score
- 0
Ok, was kidding about warez, but running a mirror of Tucows/Simtel.net would be cool too
Maybe even an English Wikipedia (as one can get it on DVD, wonder if one could access it over
a link from a DVD).
well, wikipedia etc is quite doable, if someone would have the interest of doing it. Now that you mention it, we're also running (or will be running) a musicbrainz (www.musicbrainz.org) server on the network. What I'd foresee about the wikipedia thing is how to keep it synced to the actual wikipedia (on your ADSL telskommel bandwidth, is usually the answer)?
And to the last point you were wondering about, let me introduce you to the wonder that is linux: set apache vhost root to the DVD device mountpoint (/media/wikipedia-disc is a reasonable assumption). Basically it'd look something like this:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName wikipedia.peterch.jawug
DocumentRoot /media/wikipedia-disc
Options Indexes
AccessLog /var/log/apache2/wikipedia-access.log
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/wikipedia-err.log
</VirtualHost>
And then sorted, as long as your DVD is in the drive it'd always load up the page.
The Wikipedia on the network would not need to be updated too often,
even if once or twice per year.
Secondly, I think it would rather need to be hosted on a HDD,
, a DVD spinning up each time someone accesses it would be bad.Project Gutenberg hosting would be cool too.
frozt01100101
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Jul 23, 2007
- Messages
- 276
- Reaction score
- 0
The Wikipedia on the network would not need to be updated too often,
even if once or twice per year.
Secondly, I think it would rather need to be hosted on a HDD,
Project Gutenberg hosting would be cool too.
yup, same mentality here about putting in on HD (or even SSD). my point was just you can do it without the OS killing itself (Go, Windohs, Go! Go, Windohs, Go! You can do it! Open that icon!!
). Project Gutenberg: I will, have got it here. I also host a lot of creative commons content which I find online, as well as a collection of open source applications for various purposes (windows and linux, mac on request (but now who would wanna run a mac...
)).As far as gaming goes on the network we run a few game servers on it :] And I think our community network is the only network in South Africa where you can expect latencies as low as 5ms. I had a lan at my house and 13 of us were playing CSS on a server a few KM away, and all 13 of us had 5ms pings, while another one was downloading some new linux distros off one of our mirrors at about 500Kb/s while we were gaming. Bandwidth is not an issue, especially since I have a 24mb connection My setup cost me about R2200 and I regularly donate (out of my own free will) to growing the network, replacing faulty equipment (when that does happen) and even climbing an High site or two when maintance or upgrades require so (and my personal life allows me too...)
Here's a complete list (I think) of what we play
Call of duty4, Company of heroes, Counter strike source, Dota (and regular war3 & some TD), Quake3, Team Fortress2, UT2004, UT3, World of Warcraft. Also a few racing games such as Grid, Need for speed and some other one I didn't like and therefore can't remember.
We also play pretty much anything else that people would like to play online; it's as simple as hooking up a server and posting about it on our IRC server.
There are quite a number of gamers on the wug and new ones join us all the time. On any given night we have anywhere from 4 - 19(highest I saw personally) in a single game, whilst a few others play other games.
As far as P2p goes, there's a torrent tracker hosted on PWP Wug, we run a local DC++ hub on Jawug and also a number of FTP servers on all the different WUG's. Things such as patches, service packs, open source distributions and applications are easily found on any of the above mentioned.
There's also a WSUS server available on the wug, with all the latest windows updates, thus sparing your precious monthly cap for those who would usually download updates from the internet...
We have an Asterix server on the WUG can can be used to make free voice calls to anyone else on the WUG. I use teamspeak though to keep in touch with my many friends, their friends and family members that I have conected to the WUG.
On the other hand, there's a vast amount of knowledgeable people on the WUG that offer support and help friends and fellow wuggers out. I used to think that I knew a bit about networking up until I joined Jawug, but with the help and assistance of my fellow wuggers I quickly realised that I had loads more to learn and in a few short weeks my network knowledge had more than quadrupled. My brother logs onto the IRC from time to time when he battles with Linux or network issues and there's always been someone online to provide some sort of assistance (or mental support, haha).
These are but only a few uses that I have found on the wug and know that there are many more reasons to be conected.
It really has and still is a life changing experience being connected to the wug and I really wish I could have connected even sooner!!!
Regards
Wanabe wug evangelist
Slick
My setup cost me about R2200 and I regularly donate (out of my own free will) to growing the network, replacing faulty equipment (when that does happen) and even climbing an High site or two when maintance or upgrades require so (and my personal life allows me too...)Here's a complete list (I think) of what we play
Call of duty4, Company of heroes, Counter strike source, Dota (and regular war3 & some TD), Quake3, Team Fortress2, UT2004, UT3, World of Warcraft. Also a few racing games such as Grid, Need for speed and some other one I didn't like and therefore can't remember.
We also play pretty much anything else that people would like to play online; it's as simple as hooking up a server and posting about it on our IRC server.
There are quite a number of gamers on the wug and new ones join us all the time. On any given night we have anywhere from 4 - 19(highest I saw personally) in a single game, whilst a few others play other games.
As far as P2p goes, there's a torrent tracker hosted on PWP Wug, we run a local DC++ hub on Jawug and also a number of FTP servers on all the different WUG's. Things such as patches, service packs, open source distributions and applications are easily found on any of the above mentioned.
There's also a WSUS server available on the wug, with all the latest windows updates, thus sparing your precious monthly cap for those who would usually download updates from the internet...
We have an Asterix server on the WUG can can be used to make free voice calls to anyone else on the WUG. I use teamspeak though to keep in touch with my many friends, their friends and family members that I have conected to the WUG.
On the other hand, there's a vast amount of knowledgeable people on the WUG that offer support and help friends and fellow wuggers out. I used to think that I knew a bit about networking up until I joined Jawug, but with the help and assistance of my fellow wuggers I quickly realised that I had loads more to learn and in a few short weeks my network knowledge had more than quadrupled. My brother logs onto the IRC from time to time when he battles with Linux or network issues and there's always been someone online to provide some sort of assistance (or mental support, haha).
These are but only a few uses that I have found on the wug and know that there are many more reasons to be conected.
It really has and still is a life changing experience being connected to the wug and I really wish I could have connected even sooner!!!
Regards
Wanabe wug evangelist
Slick
Guys if you want to connect, I think it boils down to this:
You're going to need a wifi card/router which is within Line-Of-Site of another jawug node - this could include (preferrably) another highsite, but could also be another user depending where on the mesh you're connecting (some users are in ad-hoc or repeater mode allowing you to connect, but others are in client mode only.).
I first connected to jawug with a Linksys WRT54G that I had lying around in my house. They still make these routers, but the revision that you can find in the shops today contains less Flash memory and we dont recommend it - mine was an older revision which they later re-released as the WRT54GL due to popular demand - try get hold of one of those instead, if you're going the router way. I didnt think I'd get reception, and I didn't - until I put some work in... I loaded a custom firmware (called freifunk but we don't really use that much anymore) - check if dd-wrt supports your router - if it does, download that and flash it. Make sure you do this correctly or you could brick your router.
Once I'd flashed a custom firmware, I configured my device to use just one of the two antennas the router had, increased the tx (transmit) power, and created a parabolic reflector out of a pringles can which i'd removed the base from and cut right down and bent to shape (this took some rebending because it's originally made round so reshaping can be a mission - you might want to rather build a reflector with some foil paper and cardboard/polystyrene, although that didn't seem to work as well for me.).
I used this for months and got decent speeds with that setup, and then finally had the money to buy a proper kit, and got a routerboard 112, a rb52 mini-pci 802.11a/b/g card, and a 24dBi grid; buying that kit has made being on JAWUG a dream. The prices have come down since I bought my stuff, so if you can fork out between a grand and a half, you're sorted. Remember, it's once off - once you have your stuff, that's it - JAWUG does not charge any kind of membership fee... at least not right now.
If you do plan on connecting with a proper kit in the near future, i'd skip the router and save to get the proper kit instead.
As usual, we strongly recommend you come chat to us over at irc://irc.jawug.za.net/wnet.
You're going to need a wifi card/router which is within Line-Of-Site of another jawug node - this could include (preferrably) another highsite, but could also be another user depending where on the mesh you're connecting (some users are in ad-hoc or repeater mode allowing you to connect, but others are in client mode only.).
I first connected to jawug with a Linksys WRT54G that I had lying around in my house. They still make these routers, but the revision that you can find in the shops today contains less Flash memory and we dont recommend it - mine was an older revision which they later re-released as the WRT54GL due to popular demand - try get hold of one of those instead, if you're going the router way. I didnt think I'd get reception, and I didn't - until I put some work in... I loaded a custom firmware (called freifunk but we don't really use that much anymore) - check if dd-wrt supports your router - if it does, download that and flash it. Make sure you do this correctly or you could brick your router.
Once I'd flashed a custom firmware, I configured my device to use just one of the two antennas the router had, increased the tx (transmit) power, and created a parabolic reflector out of a pringles can which i'd removed the base from and cut right down and bent to shape (this took some rebending because it's originally made round so reshaping can be a mission - you might want to rather build a reflector with some foil paper and cardboard/polystyrene, although that didn't seem to work as well for me.).
I used this for months and got decent speeds with that setup, and then finally had the money to buy a proper kit, and got a routerboard 112, a rb52 mini-pci 802.11a/b/g card, and a 24dBi grid; buying that kit has made being on JAWUG a dream. The prices have come down since I bought my stuff, so if you can fork out between a grand and a half, you're sorted. Remember, it's once off - once you have your stuff, that's it - JAWUG does not charge any kind of membership fee... at least not right now.
If you do plan on connecting with a proper kit in the near future, i'd skip the router and save to get the proper kit instead.
As usual, we strongly recommend you come chat to us over at irc://irc.jawug.za.net/wnet.
Last edited:
ja, go for mikrotik from the start
DraK
Well-Known Member
I miss my wug......
Got new gear but moving in 2 weeks...
Got new gear but moving in 2 weeks...
Thanks guys for answering the questions in such detail. My main motivation for my post was to spur on some conversation, because information is whats going to get more people on the wug, and thats good for everyone.
Someone should create a youtube type site within jawug. Its the one activity south africans cant really take part in because of bandwidth considerations. Videos could be uploaded by members as they get them from the net on their usual excursions.
Someone should create a youtube type site within jawug. Its the one activity south africans cant really take part in because of bandwidth considerations. Videos could be uploaded by members as they get them from the net on their usual excursions.
Out of interest, what are the legal implications? What would happen if one of your many members suddenly made his connection to the net (via dial/adsl/leased line) available to the group, for no cost and again for a minimal cost?
If a member decided to be charitable and offer internet would you kick them off the mesh?
Thats just not viable
we've seen it done and with 200 odd wuggers the line is very quickly saturated and useless.As soon as there is any commercial activity that takes place the wug is required to have an ECNS license and is liable to be prosecuted by ICASA for not having one.
In many cases the user are (in effect) giving you free access to their internet by downloading stuff and making it freely available to the other members. I - for example - mirror most of the ubuntu repo's (downloaded with my own internet access) and served for the users of the wug. Giving every user free direct internet access just requires amounts of upstream capacity that we will never get donated
Is that the case even if it was not for profit, just covering costs and maybe even short a few rands?
I think the main reason why we exclude internet from the wug is because it will attract people who would just want to use it for the internet. We don't exactly want those kinds of people as part of our community, congesting the network for the rest of us.
Last edited:
Yes. One of the other issues is that the WUG's are experimental community networks and there is absolutely no guarantee of uptime, performance, speed or any of the other things you expect from an Internet provider. It takes days, weeks or even months to get things fixed if they break cause everyone is doing this in their spare time. The moment we accept payment for a service we are contractually bound to provide the service - irrespective of how much profit or loss we are making and there is no one who has the time to commit to an SLA that will be even vaguely acceptable for an Internet service.
R1800(ish) is not a lot of money to spend for a once-off cost - no monthly charges, no subscription fees... once off!
There are a couple of torrent servers.. I am currently downloading the new OpenSuse 11 64bit from a Wugger!
You can obviously transfer them, answering your question directly - but I'm under the impression what you really wanted to know was 'is there a torrent tracker on the wug?', which there certainly is!