RunningWithBulls.com - The curse of Sanfermin

FON WiFi SSID: FON_Lower_Ormond_Quay (Map available tomorrow)

When I arrived back yesterday into Dublin airport, the first thing I did was to get connected to the Internet and download Fon’s new wireless access point firmware (based on OpenWRT Linux distro).

I spent the day today at home relaxing and sleeping after our travels to La Gomera, and I thought what a better way than to relax to install Ireland’s first Fon Hotspot (if I am wrong, please let me know!).

I spent the day talking with Antoin (who put me onto this in the first place), trying to figure stuff out and look for a good supplier of Linksys WRT54G* hardware.

At the moment details are kinda sketchy, so I will try to be as complete as possible.

The most popular wireless access points (herein WAP) that are currently supported are the Linksys WRT54G(firmware available here: WRT54G), and the Linksys WRT54GS(firmware available here: WRT54GS). A full (current as of 16/11/2005) list of supported hardware is available here and the full list of OpenWRT supported hardware is available here.

If, like me, you have a WRT54GS device you want a version wrt54gs v1.1 device to work (serial number beginning with CGN2 = WRT54GS v1.1 / BCM5325EKQM Chipset).

A very indepth explanation of the WRT54G family of units is available here at the Wikipedia.

Fon supply a manual for the firmware upgrade, but currently it is in Spanish only. It is available for download here in pdf and here in Microsoft powerpoint presentation (NB: both link directly to the files).

The upgrade is, to be honest, easy enough. It took me today approx. 1 hour to do the full install, and about 20 minutes of that was reading the manual.

It is a good idea to register yourself for a Fon account before you start the process. You can do so here.

My setup was slightly different that the vanilla Fon setup. For one currently my DSL provider is Eircom. Eircom provide you with a Netopia 3347NWG DSL router and WAP in one box.

By default the Netopia box LAN range is 192.168.1.xxx and DHCP is enabled.
If I was to follow Fon’s manual I would have to change that setup for my network. But since I have a number of devices on my network already, I thought I would change the Fon setup.

This did not take much time, but there was some “messing about”.

From the Fon network layout diagram in the manual (shown below) I changed the following configurations:

ADSL Modem LAN IP: 192.168.1.xxx
Linksys WiFi Router WAN IP: 192.168.1.xxx
Linksys WiFi Router LAN IP: 192.168.10.xxx

Basically I swapped the subnet network ranges around, as I had an already configured network running on 192.168.1.xxx

Once I decided what subnet was going to be what, I followed the steps.

The steps to follow are:

1. Logon to you already configured Linksys WRT and configure the Internet or WAN interface (192.168.1.xxx as above). The gateway will be the ADSL Modem LAN IP already configured (as above)
2. The configure the Local Network or LAN interface (192.168.10.xxx as above). At this point you can also turn on DHCP and create as many DHCP leases as you wish (its recommended to create 50).
3. At this point you have the ethernet config done. now you have to name the WAP. Along with the recommendations given in the manual, call the AP something geographically descriptive, FON_Your_Street or something similar.
4. At this point you have to test the network connectivity. Ping, traceroute and web access are your friends here.
Once you have network connectivity you can move on (I had some issues here due to my “original setup”, and I moved on to the firmware upgrade anyway)
5. At this point you can flash the AP to convert it into the Fon Hotspot.
6. Go to the web interface of the WRT54G and navigate to “Administration->FirmwareUpgrade”. Once here click on Browse and select the new firmware. NB: Make sure you use the correct firmware when flashing the device. The outcome of the wrong firmware might be bad. My device firmware is fon-wrt54gs-0.5.0.bin.
Once all is successful you will get a page with “Upgrade is successful”. Its recommended to wait 3 minutes before rebooting the device.
7. If all went to plan, you will be able to browse to http://192.168.1.1 (or http://192.168.10.xxx - depending on if you changed the Fon network subnet details as I did) and log in with your already created Fon account (as detailed above).
8. At the moment the firmware is in Spanish, and hopefully this will be available in English soon (if only to make it easier for non-Spanish speaking people to install). To add local users (required if you are going to use the WAP for your home browsing, you need to navigate to informacion->usuarios locales and create a user/pass (tip: Nombre de Usuario means username and Contraseña means password..)
Finally hit “Finalizar Registro” and thats done.
9. In the section on “Acceso a la red FON” they talk of connecting to the Fon WAP network and being brought to a capture page.

At the moment I am seeking clarification to exactly what I will see here. At the moment Fon has not been released in Ireland (as an official network).

Anymore that than I cannot tell you too much.

As an owner of a Fon WAP, you get web interface to the device, you can also get SSH shell access to it, and run a number of commands from the commandline.

As with other Linux Distros in a box, you can download a number of other packages for the install.

Much to my amazement I seemed to have a customer shortly after 17:30. It seemed that there was a DHCP lease 946730746 00:40:f4:a0:7d:82 192.168.10.127 manesi-6s4j9wou 01:00:40:f4:a0:7d:82 which was a windows machine after doing some checking.

I found this hard to believe but after making sure, yes there was a machine there!

Fon and the WiFi Nation could spell trouble for Eircom in that people will start to do more over Internet *IF* these WAPs become ubiqutous (sp?). Also it could potentially take business away from their “WiFi Hotspot in a Box” product that they already sell.

It could also spell trouble for companies like Bitbuzz who sell WiFi access to places like bars, and cafes, potentially allowing bar owners, cafe owners to setup their own (or get a helpful tech) with their already present DSL lines and charge as part of the Fon network.

There are some interesting weeks ahead!