August 7, 2008 Meeting Minutes

Meeting Attendees

Attendees: Craig Anderson, Heather Stern, Bill Moffitt, Ian Kluft, Warren & Rachel Turkal, Tim Utsich, Ed Cherlin, Sean Lynch, David ?, Owen De Long, Scott ? (from Hawaii),

Meeting Discussion

Here is a synopsis of our discussions from Thursday's meeting. It was a very good and productive meeting.

We had a number of new people who showed up in response to our booth at Linux World Expo this week so I first started out giving a background discussion of our plans and current status. This was quite a lively process. When we got to the discussion of current status Warren gave a report on the last hack-session from July 20th. The result from that effort was the discovery that the Linksys WRT54G is only supported by the 2.4 Linux kernel on OpenWRT. This is because the Broadcom chip set used in the WRT54G is supported only by a binary driver distributed only by Broadcom. This driver does not support IPv6. We had some significant discussion on alternate hardware that we can use for radios but we could not find any that met our needs (current Linux 2.6 kernel drivers that can act in Master mode).

This led us to the conclusion that we should proceed with the hardware we have and use IPv4 only at this point with the commitment to move to IPv6 as soon as we can.

The reason for proceeding with deployment rather than waiting for better hardware was because the State is holding an exercise on October 23rd that will include, at last count, over 60 agencies in the Bay Area. We would like to be ready to participate in that exercise. Not to mention the fact that we can't sell marketing slides, we need to have "rough consensus and working code", as the IETF likes to say.

We would like to have another hack-session Sunday, August 17th starting at 14:00 at my house. We are shooting for these goals:

1) building up the San Jose Emergency Operations Center (EOC) with a router and another radio/antenna on the new antenna mount on the roof.

2) rebuild the Los Gatos repeater site with a computer, a new Linksys radio/antenna pointing toward Cupertino and Campbell, change the omnidirectional antenna with an 18db panel antenna, upgrade the firmware in the existing WRT54G radio.

3) demonstrating connectivity to Cupertino and Campbell with enough lead-time for them to buy their own gear and get it set up before the State exercise.

4) connecting from the San Jose EOC to Lowell's house. (Due to the urgency of the State exercise, this is a bit lower priority, thought it shouldn't be difficult to do.)

No problem, eh?

In preparation for this, I will be spending some significant time in the EOC upgrading the computers that are currently installed there.

-- CraigAnderson - 08 Aug 2008
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