So I’m here in Big Spring, TX on a mission trip at Gateway Baptist Church. I’m helping with sound and various other things. Lots of community events and a Vacation Bible School program are how my home church is ministering to the populace. So far, life’s good; despite hot sleeping quarters for the guys I think we’ve God through us has had a huge impact here this week. So far twelve kids have come to Christ; there will probably be more salvations before the week’s up. That’s really cool. I’ll link to a slideshow once I’m done here on Twitter (I’m leaving Saturday morning for Colorado).
So if you’re a techie and am wondering what the “Networking Green Belt” part of the post is, bear with me. First let me lay out the internet situation in Big Sprint: Alltel EvDO, Basin 2Way as a WISP, Suddenlink for cable, one or two numbers for dialup. Sprint (my typical cellular carrier) is 1xRTT-only here, as is Verizon for the moment (but they’ll be EvDO soon once they integrate Alltel’s network). Not sure yet abut Basin 2Way’s services and pricing, though I’ll bet it’s only economical for folks who can’t get cable. For cable, Suddenlink is the provider; I’ve detailed their pricing plans and traceroutes here, here and here. Please disregard the extraneous discussion about DOCSIS modulations. Dialup is one of two phone numbers to my knowledge, one for AOL and one for everyone else. This is one of the few areas where TOAST.net has no local numbers, depiste their aggregation of dozens of dialup access number providers. The numbers here are owned by SBC/AT&T, but not WorldNet. Fun stuff.
So back to my networking green belt.
The church here has Suddenlink internet, which is nice for me since I thus don’t have to use my phone on roaming to get decent internet speeds; since my dialup plan doesn’t have local numbers in the area my only other option would’ve been using my phone for 1xRTT, which is dog slow.
However the church was using a Linksys WRT54G2 to spread the internet around, and it wasn’t making it to the other side of the building. So I added a Linksys WRT320N to the team shopping list and swapped that out for the WRT54G2. The signal ended up better, but not by enough.
So I grabbed their old router and set about figuring out how to use it as a repeater. The router is rather capable, with 16MB of RAM, though as with other consumer routers the 2MB of flash memory meant I could only flash the micro-plus-ssh version of DD-WRT onto the device. Still, that’s a whole lot better than mere micro; that’s what I have on my home router back in Fredericksburg, a WRT54Gv5. To get DD-WRT onto the router I followed these instructions. Basically I downloaded Linksys’ TFTP utility, then sent the VxWorks prep file, then the killer file, then the DD-WRT firmware to the router. The whole process took maybe ten minutes.
I then went here to figure out how to set the router up as a repeater, something that I hadn’t done before. The setup image was very helpful in getting everything…um…set up, and shortly I had Gateway Baptist G throwing wireless signal into the far corner of the building. Score.
Granted, the WRT54G2 won’t be the speediest repeater, since all traffic has to be passed wirelessly from it to the main router, which is then connected to the Suddenlink Ambit cable modem, but that’s not a big deal when you’re working with a megabit internet connection to start with. The big deal is that everything works, and it works everywhere it needs to. Plus, I learned a bit more about DD-WRT, knowledge I’ll apply when I get back to Fredericksburg to expand my home network by a bit. I think that’s a Win-Win-Win or something…well, the WRT320N did cost too much, but oh well.