Friend(ly) Network

[JD]

I like pictures That should help us all understand it.

[Mysteryous]

There you have it, an illustration of what I am trying to do. If you ask where the world wide web is in there, there isn't one. It plays no part in this scheme. In fact it is not supposed to play a part in this scheme.

[JD]

The problem I see is how are you going to use the Cable Company's coaxial cable? I'm pretty sure that's illegal.

I get the point that you basically want to setup a LAN within your town amongst a few houses, but I doubt you can use the coaxial lines to do it. If by some chance you can, to run a standard IP network over coaxial you'd need some enterprise/ISP equipment I'd think. You still don't exactly have a way to output it though.

You also can't exactly run Ethernet between houses either without some kind of approval from the city I'd think. Unless you do it at night

I think the only way your going to get by the laws and what not is to setup a Wi-Fi network. If you have a direct line of sight between houses then you could achieve nice Wi-Fi signal strength. About the only way I can see your plan working.

[Mysteryous]

Well there are many things that I did under the governments nose, and I haven't yet got caught. And I only have line-of-sight to one of the houses and I have been thinking about it, but I want to try to prove this concept also. Ebay might get me what I want as far as "enterprising equipment" goes.

[JD]

I think cost wise and legality (is that the right word?) wise it's best to go with WiFi, but if you can find all the equipment and figure out how to piggyback onto the Cable Co's coaxial then go for it.

[sswilson]

Originally Posted by Mysteryous

Well there are many things that I did under the governments nose, and I haven't yet got caught. And I only have line-of-sight to one of the houses and I have been thinking about it, but I want to try to prove this concept also. Ebay might get me what I want as far as "enterprising equipment" goes.

To do it legally, you should consider some form of mesh network like I mentioned in the first few posts.

If you have line of site to one of the houses, you would be able to piggyback all along the way (as long as each next house in line had line-of-site).

Each house would required a mesh server, but you would be able to get away with old P3's and should even be able to telnet into them so all that would be required would be the tower & a wireless nic.

Should be able to find a linux distro that would be pretty well plug and play.

[Mysteryous]

Yes I am thinking of using directional antennas to route to one of the houses, but the other house is blocked by a treeline and a house. Would a high gain (+20db) directional antenna be able to penetrate that? Setting it high enough would clear the house so thats no problem there. DSL seems like a good choice because to save space and power, I can successfully configure an old computer to run of a USB drive. Those things will outlast any hard drive, sip power, and with a USB 2.0 card, perform fast enough for its purpose. USB 1.1 might be good enough if commonly used resources could be loaded into ram at startup. If DSL is not an option, I could use ReactOS, because I will not use windows, its not good enough for that application.