South Bruce Peninsular - Cottage WiFi on CD - Comments

$20 Gateway

garym — Wed, 06 Jul 2005 11:43:25 -0400

Jumpin' Jimminies, while it won't do the one-box Wifi-Dog trick, dig this: Business Depot offers the NWR04B-CA Wireless Router for $19.95! Crikey -- I recently paid $40 each for two 4-port hubs, and this one not only replaces them, but adds the wireless gateway.

May and I took the kids to the Sauble Bakery this morning where, at the back table, a woman was hard at work pouring over spreadsheets on her laptop. "You on wireless?," I asked and she laughed and said, "No."

But at $20 plus an old PC and the ZoneCD, maybe she should have said, "Not today. But come back tomorrow."

garym: ict evangelist - musician - whatever

WiFi-Dog

garym — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 10:45:39 -0400

WiFi-Dog is an alternative approach that's a bit trickier to implement, but if I understand the installation instructions correctly, the whole gateway becomes completely contained inside the linksys Wireless-G router. Amounts to pretty much the same feature set as the gateway off the ZoneCD, but requires the delicate procedure of re-flashing the ROM inside the router.

WiFi-Dog is the gateway software of choice for both the Toronto Wireless and the London (England) Wireless campaigns.

garym: ict evangelist - musician - whatever

Cottage WiFi on CD

garym — Mon, 04 Jul 2005 13:26:17 -0400

For cottage managers and motel, campground or cafe operators planning to offer local area wireless Internet (WiFi), getting in the game just got a lot easier. All you need now is an old Pentium, a low-cost wireless router, and the ZoneCD:

ZoneCD is a bootable CD with software pre-configured to create a WiFi gateway. The CD is a mini operating system with automatic hardware detection, and includes support for WiFi end-user authentication and web content filtering.
[ via PUBLICip ]

If anyone is interested, I have a supply of ZoneCD available; just leave me a note through the SBP. ZoneCD is Linux, but you don't have to know anything about Linux to use the ZoneCD. You just place the CD in your CD-ROM, and turn it on -- couldn't be simpler.

And best of all, each ZoneCD station is set to co-operate with other nearby ZoneCD sites, so there's no confusion, and offers us a technology to provide wide-scale wireless coverage, one location at a time. Now how cool is that!?