Circuit Rider
Version 4.7
By Jim Scheef

Improvements to the Resource Center

DACS is extremely lucky to have our Resource Center (RC). It may not be much to look at when compared to a modern office meeting room, but it’s ours. We all owe former DACS President, Dick Gingras a huge thank you for his work and foresight in obtaining this space for the club. Back in the “old days” each SIG leader had to find his/her own place to hold meetings and most were far from ideal. For those of you unfamiliar with the RC, it is located in the lower level of Ives Manor on Main St. in downtown Danbury. Ives Manor is operated by the Danbury Housing Authority.

Current improvements to the RC are in the form of “new” equipment that the SIGs can use for various purposes to further the club goals of education for our members and the community. The Server and Networking SIG is presently installing four or five “new” servers. Come and help us all as we learn about enterprisegrade servers, networking, operating systems, power management, etc., etc. One of our first goals is to use one of these servers to explore and test ideas for a new DACS web site. I guarantee that the more people who come and help, the more we will all learn.

Is the SCO saga nearing an end?
SCO may be nearing bankruptcy which might end this lawyers’ bonanza.
See www.linux-watch.com/news/ NS6344337348.html for an update.

Wi-Fi in Waiting Rooms
I started writing this column while waiting for my car at the Ford dealer in an unspecified Connecticut city. There was no Wi-Fi anywhere in the dealership. If I have to sit there waiting for my car, I would like to make the time productive, and I’m not alone. Several times I’ve seen other people using their laptops, trying to get some work done while waiting. Doctors’ offices present a slightly different situation where the doctor is often running late yet they ask that you arrive early to update your insurance, etc. I would be happy to arrive early if I could be productive while waiting. This could lead to a treatise on my ideal notebook for computing on the go, but I save that for another time.

Routers, Routing and getting from here to there
Regular readers know that the networking at my house is far from “typical”, so when I have problems, they tend to be harder to diagnose. In my latest problem, I have cured the symptom without solving the real problem. The problem started when I reconfigured the wireless router that lives in the attic to have its own network address rather than just being part of the ‘wired’ network. Eventually the wireless network will work like the one in the Danbury Hospital auditorium where you must agree to “terms of service” before you get access to the Internet. Also, like the hospital, I want to limit “guest” machines to just the Internet and keep them out of my network. Then I can open the router up to anyone close enough to get a signal. But first I need to make this work for my machines where they have full access to everything. So my home network is really two networks; first a router at the network gateway with a network address of 10.0.42.23 (the normal connection to the Internet) and the wireless router forms a second network at 10.1.42.1. Thus packets from computers on the wireless network must pass through both routers to reach the Internet connection to my ISP.

The implications of the second network are many. A router is a device to create a path between two networks. So the most fundamental issue is that the wireless router must now actually route packets between these two networks. My first and most significant problem was that while the computers on the wireless network could get to the Internet (packets passing through both routers) but they cannot “see” any computers on the wired network. While this is, in fact, how I want the wireless network to work for guests, I want full access!

Every computer running the Internet Protocol (the IP in TCP/IP) has a “route table” in memory. How it builds this table is something I still don’t fully understand, but I’m learning. This table starts with the network configuration information that either you enter manually into your computer orcomes from a DHCP (dynamic host configuration protocol) server. This basic information is the machine’s IP address, something called a netmask, and a gateway or default route. This is actually the IP address of the router on the local network. Without getting into “Routing 101”, the computer then learns additional routes as you use the network and these new routes are added to the route table. You can display this table on your computer by typing “route print” in a command window.

The “solution” that cured the problem is to add a “route” directly to the machines on the wired network that tells them how to reach the wireless network. This is not how it is supposed to be done; it should be automatic and somewhere, some machine is dropping the ball. Type “route /?” at a command prompt to see how to manually add a route. Stay tuned, there is much more to this. As I learn, I’ll share.

An offer for DACS members
Back in December I wrote about one of my “other clubs” and vintage computer collecting. The Mid-Atlantic Retro Computing Hobbyists, Inc. is building a computer museum in Wall, NJ, on the Jersey Shore. The club will host its second “Vintage Computer Festival - East” in June. One of my projects is to have Wi-Fi installed and working for that event. Curious how we mix the old and the new, isn’t it? For this project I would like to buy up to twenty used Linksys routers. I’ll pay up to $20 for your old router if it’s suitable for the project. You can use the money to upgrade to a new router with the latest technology and fastest speeds. The models I can use are shown in the table. Each hardware version is identified by the first four characters of the serial number. The very latest versions are not suitable (NS) for the project.