When we last left our protagonists, they were having a beer at the June DC Drupal Meetup at Stetson’s Bar, grumbling about the lack of wireless internet access. There had been an attempt earlier that night to get an access point working, but it had been thwarted by an uncooperative and inaccessible upstream router. Can you say “no DHCP lease for YOU!”?
And so it was resolved by the DC Drupal Meetup High Command that our protagonists would be deployed behind the lines. Mission? Restore wireless to the thirsty masses at Stetson’s before the next DC Drupal Meetup. Equipment was chosen, a date was set, and a plan was hatched.
The hour arrived. The duo approached the location armed with a spare Linksys 802.11G access point, a MacBook, 25’ of cat 5, a leatherman tool, and all the MacGuyver mojo they could channel. They were led by Jon, the trusted contact “on the inside,” to the inner sanctum of Stetson’s (aka the “manager’s office”) where they discovered their target: the Linksys wireless access point left behind after the last meetup.
They powered it up, ran a cat 5, coaxed some knowledge from ifconfig |grep inet, fired up a browser, and made their best guess as to the router’s administrative password (yes, it was the default, but it’s not anymore). Next up was teaching it to swim upstream. Here’s where it got interesting. The uplink ran to a late 90s vintage DSL modem that hadn’t seen A/C power since the Clinton administration. MacGuyver might have gotten out his duct tape and bubble gum, but our protagonists just aren’t that good. Instead, they found a broadband router known to be connected to a working Comcast modem, and a few cat 5 re-pluggings later they were in business: DHCP for all. Configuring the wireless network was straightforward (SSID is ‘Stetsons’; no password because Stetson’s is cool), and they used the fantastic AP Grapher to find an open channel to make this router heard amongst all the other 2.4GHz chatter in the area. Once some empty broadcast real estate was found, they commenced the final test: does it work out front in the bar? Here’s your answer:
Macintosh-9:~ Tim$ ping google.com<br />PING google.com (64.233.167.99): 56 data bytes<br />64 bytes from 64.233.167.99: icmp_seq=0 ttl=239 time=42.710 ms<br />64 bytes from 64.233.167.99: icmp_seq=1 ttl=239 time=38.383 ms<br />64 bytes from 64.233.167.99: icmp_seq=2 ttl=239 time=39.130 ms<br />