HearthNet
It’s a stunning crisp, clear and moonless night, the sky a blackground [sic] of maxi-noir, the wide streak of the Milky Way splattered across it, and the foreground riddled star bright like the oncoming headlights of Heaven. Even after living here for a year and half, the first time i look up at such an evening’s sky, i just go tharn for a minute. And each subsequent gander takes my breath way, again. It would take your breath away too, a little more than these words do, if i owned a camera good enough to capture it. Do you think Santa reads this blog?
So, how would you spend such a night? Yeah, that’s a good idea. But i’ve spent the first hours of it installing the new WiFi network here on the bottom land at Hearth Hill. Phase One of this project should connect the two houses (which are separated by over a 100 yards, a couple small buildings, several trees, and an big old school West Virginia state flower that we’ve yet to remove), as well as the area around and between the two houses, with one seamless wireless network that allows us and our guests (and any passing hillbilly with a decent laptop and plenty of gumption) to share internet access, files, printers, iTunes music and even stereo speakers, all without needing to plug into anything. Like, we’re plugged into the Aether, man.
The photo at the top of this page shows the uni-directional antenna i just mounted on the modular house, and pointed at the log house. Hmmmm. Well, i thought i’d pointed it at the log house. But here i sit in that house without an internet connection. Which means this entry won’t get uploaded until after i get this up and running. <scratches head> Maybe i just need a bigger booster. Didn’t i get a spam email about that yesterday? <sudden impulse to scratch other head> Oh, uh, never mind; that email was about something else.
If you’re reading this, Phase One of HearthNet is now complete. Which means: when you and your laptop sit down anywhere on the property that you currently find both an electric outlet and a chair -- and a few other places besides -- you’ll also find a wireless network and internet connection.
For my fellow geeks who are curious (lapsing into the Tech dialect of English for a paragraph or two)... Our internet service is provided via DSL by the tiny local telephone company. We’re about 10,000 feet from the central office. The network is built using WDS technology, with a mixture of hardware currently (or soon) including: a Siemen’s DSL modem / router (presently doing the DHCP dirty work), a main access point (Apple AirPort Extreme Base Station with a MacWireless 500 mW booster and a 10DBi unidirectional outdoor antenna), a relay (another Apple AirPort Extreme Base Station) and several remote access points (an Apple AirPort Express Base Station, and a couple Belkin Wireless G Routers). So far, i’m happy with all this hardware, and satisfied with how the pieces interoperate.
Phase Two will install, reposition and fine tune those remote access points, to maximize reception in every room of each house, as well as providing wired Ethernet connections for older computers (like the guest computer in the log house) and other hardware. That should be completed within a month. Phase Three will someday extend this wireless network to more or less cover all 4 acres of our bottomland (i.e. almost all of the land we own that is not on the hill). Phase Four would extend the network up onto the the hill (potentially using a couple of high powered point-to-point WiFi antennas) to the first cluster of homes that get built up there. Mind you, these last couple phases are intentions or ideas, more than firm plans; all future plans are subject to change, as better ideas, changing priorities or reality interpose.
