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How-To: Setup Air-stream at home.

So you want to get on Air-Stream? Great! Here's a little How-To for getting yourself connected to the network.

All Air-Stream connections are made up of 3 essential parts:

  1. Some Wireless Gear
  2. A Pole or Mast to mount the gear
  3. Cabling back to your own network and power

In this guide we'll cover these three basic items as we walk through how Air-Stream-Modbury-North was setup from scratch.

There will also be a rough costing listed for how much everything cost to give you a realistic idea on what it costs to connect in.

Parallel Port (LPT) Remote Control

The aim of this circuit is to enable a system script to reset or power cycle an AP or router when they crash or lock, which does happen from time to time. This is very usefully where access to a site is limited.

Nevertheless the same circuit could be used for any remote control project where you need to switch on and off a device using a computer.

The following circuits are drawn out in such a way that it can be easily assembled on vero-board.

The design allows from 1 to 7 relays to be used.

The download link for two different versions are as follows:

One Relay: http://www.air-stream.org/files/1_channel_LPT_0.pdf
Seven Relays: http://www.air-stream.org/files/7_channel_LPT.pdf


Power Over Ethernet (PoE) Building

An Ethernet Wireless Device is a very practical approach, mainly because they can be located near the Antenna in a waterproof box and the Ethernet cable can be run a fair distance away up to 300 metres in some cases.

Ethernet connections require only two pairs of cable TX & RX, but in a standard Cat5e cable there are 4 pairs. This allows for the spare pair to used for injection of power over the Ethernet. Called Power Over Ethernet (PoE) it is common practice to use the Blue and Brown pairs for this purpose.


OpenWRT and Quagga For Dynamic Router

Adding Quagga to OpenWRT for Dynamic Routing

Read up on http://quagga.net

Get your AS number for your AP and neighbours from the committee

Install Quagga

ipkg install quagga
ipkg install quagga-zebra
ipkg install quagga-bgpd

Configure Quagga

vi /etc/quagga/zebra.conf
vi /etc/quagga/bgpd.conf

Add PID files

touch /var/bgpd.pid
chmod 777 /var/bgpd.pid
touch /var/zebra.pid
chmod 777 /var/zebra.pid

Check Init files

/etc/init.d/S35quagga

OpenWRT Kamikaze Build

Building your own OpenWRT firmware from SVN: Kamikaze

Using OpenWRT from the the downloads.openwrt.org means you are bound to a slow release and testing cycle: White Russian RC6 is the most current release at time of writing

This means that you are stuck with an older kernel 2.4.30 and older builds of the software that is based on that kernel

Also the configuration and management system is a generation behind

The alternative is to use Kamikaze, this is downloaded from a developers site

Anybody with some basic programming skills and some linux experience will have no trouble building the source directly from the Subversion Repository

Take this guide as a glossary, refer to https://dev.openwrt.org/ as your bible

Target build Linux Operating System


How-To Guides

If you can’t find what your looking for here please let us know and we’ll try to write up a how-to. But it doesn’t just end here either as members include people from all walks of life including trades people, enthusiasts, IT professionals, radio amateurs, engineers, educators and every day people.

So asking questions in the, comments, discussing in forums, attending our monthly meetings and becoming a member is a great way to find out more about wireless networking. If you don’t know there is always someone else how will and is happy to share their knowledge, so just ask.


UltraWAP power over ethernet mods

Posted November 4th, 2006 by Anonymous

More power over ethernet mods. This one for an UltraWAP.


Making Wifi

Making Wifi
Katrina Jungnickel our resident PhD sociology student from the University of Surrey, UK is in Adelaide looking into the visual culture that surrounds community wireless networks. Read about her community wifi adventures at www.studioincite.com/makingwifi


Spark for Windows and OSX

1. Download latest Spark

Spark is a barebones Jabber client made by Jive Software. Its avaliable for Mac OS X, Linux and Unix, and Windows from http://www.jivesoftware.org.

2. Configure Spark for Air-Stream

Once downloaded, the configuration process should be similar on all operating systems. You will be presented with the following screens the first time you run Spark.



Edit the appropriate information, as below.

  • Username: Your Air-Stream LDAP username.
  • Password: Your Air-Stream LDAP password.
  • Server: chat.air-stream.org
  • Tick save password, and choose Auto Login to make life a bit easier.

Adium for OSX

Note: This guide applies to people using the Mac OS X operating system.

1. Download latest Adium

2. Install to Applications folder

  • Once the disk image has been downloaded, it may or may not automatically be 'mounted' by your system.
  • If it's not already mounted (identified by a removable disk icon in the finder), just double click on the .dmg file you downloaded to do so.
  • Install Adium by dragging the Adium icon from the mounted disk image, into your Applications folder.
  • You may be prompted to enter an administrator's password at this time.

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