This month, the CUWiN staff will give visitors a chance to get their hands on the code that makes the community network run. Specifically, this Hack Night will be devoted towards testing, debugging, and improving Nodeconfig, our work-in-progress easy-to-use interface to the CUWiN system. Participants will get to work on our indoor testbed, where we will demonstrate how to access and hack on a live network. NOTE: By all means bring your own laptop along to use, to supplement the computers we have available. Hack Night will begin at 6 pm in the UCIMC Building, a.k.a. the Urbana Post Office, on October 29, 2006. The UCIMC Building is at 202 S. Broadway, Urbana, Illinois.

Hack Night meets on the last Sunday of the month and is free to the public. It gives people in the community a chance to learn more about the CUWiN project, to get involved with hardware and software development, or just to meet people in the community who are interested in wireless technologies.

As always, pizza will be provided.

For more information, contact:

Josh King, CUWiN Network Engineer,
Email: cu-wireless-support@cuwireless.net, Subject: Hack Night
Tel: +1 217 278-3933 x.30

CUWiN Team members Ross Musselman (Outreach Coordinator) and David Young (Chief Engineer) are on the ground in Dharamsala, India at the AirJaldi summit. Ross has been blogging at:

http://nsneedle.blogspot.com

CUWiN is pleased to announce that we have successfully ported our flagship software to the Meraki Mini. Documentation on the port can be found at http://cuwin.net/manual/howto/meraki.

Porting CUWiN software to the Meraki Mini makes using CUWiNware even cheaper by dropping the price point of nodes that can run CUWiNware from a few hundred dollars to around $50. The Meraki Mini is perfect for making apartment buildings and office spaces wireless, as the infrastructure costs are significantly cheaper than wired installations.

For more information about CUWiN, contact
Ross Musselman
ross@cuwin.net
Tel: +1 217 278-3933 x. 30, Fax: +1 217 278-7171

CUWiN Executive Director, Sascha Meinrath, is blogging from the Alternative Telecom Policy Forum in Ottawa Canada today and tomorrow. He gave a plenary session last night on Community and Municipal Wireless Networking and the COMMONS Project (to create a collaborative fiber peering network among participating networks) -- and hopes to have the slides from that presentation up on his blog momentarily.

Meanwhile, Sheila Copps, former minister of Canadian Heritage, just presented. Ile Sans Fil Co-Founder, Michael Lenczner blogs about it here.

Meanwhile if you'd like to "join" the forum -- live video, audio and (occassionally snarky) commentary is publicly available here.

More blogging updates will be available here.

September 19, 2006

CUWiN announces a new version of its flagship software, CUWiNware 0.7.0. CUWiNware enables neighbors and communities to create a mesh wireless network that can share Internet connections, establish local VoIP services, and utilize peer-to-peer connections to improve their broadband experience. CUWiNware 0.7.0 makes community networking easier to use than ever before. CUWiNware is free open source software, which makes it as much as 75% cheaper than its proprietary competitors.

CUWiNware version 0.7.0 makes great strides forward in usability and reliability. Dual radio support is the most visible addition to CUWiNware, allowing a single node to provide a public access point in addition to providing network infrastructure. Network traffic is handled more reliably. It also makes gateway configuration more robust. Logging synchronization simplifies network administration, in addition to a test version of a web-based configuration tool. CUWiNware 0.7.0 also supports more diverse hardware.

“The effect of version 0.7.0 will soon be felt in the local Champaign-Urbana community, as the City of Urbana converts their current nodes into dual-radio nodes, providing free wireless Internet hotspots in places like Crane Alley, the Market on the Square, and Lincoln Square Mall,” said CUWiN Outreach Coordinator Ross Musselman. “This release brings us another step closer to the kind of networks we envision: user owned and operated broadband networks.”

For the technical community, CUWiNware 0.7.0 marks a major step forward in community wireless networking:

• Dual radio allows a single node to act both as backhaul for the network and as an access point for public use.
• Improved routing fidelity and routing daemon reliability, implements a more robust DHCPselect feature for gateway auto-configuration.
• Syncing of HSLS daemon logs with Zebra logs for better debugging.
• Non-i386 architectures support, including nascent support for the Atheros AR5312.
• NodeConfig, a web-based graphical user interface that allows the user to change the node's settings through a web browser. Version 0.7.0 contains a beta version of this feature, which can be accessed by typing the IP of the node into one's browser.

Release Notes:
CUWiNware Version 0.7.0 was released on September 19, 2006.

For more information, contact:
Ross Musselman, CUWiN Outreach Coordinator
Email: rgmussel@cuwireless.net
Tel: +1 217 278-3933 x.30