Now you’re sharing with the neighbors and surfing from the park, what’s next? So glad you asked! How’s this for starters:

Some access points support Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and use it to provide basic traffic statistics.With the right software, you can retrieve these statistics and log them over time to produce graphs like the one shown in Figure 8-24. In this residential wireless LAN, traffic peaks each evening after work. Business hours are the best times for large downloads.

The classic free server software for producing graphs is Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG)

A typical consumer access point consists of a custom-designed computer board running a low power (though high-speed) Million Instructions Per Second (MIPS) processor, a stripped-down radio card, and some fancy custom software. With a little time and exploration, you can build something with much greater capabilities, including more power, more fine tuning possible, and extra features only limited by your skill and imagination.

One popular alternative to off-the-shelf access point hardware is the Soekris single board computer using a mini-PCI wireless card (see Figure 8-25).With some special software, a little configuration and a PoE adapter, this board becomes a professional-grade access point.

The logical hardware for a homebrew access point is a PC-based architecture. They’re cheap, plentiful, and well supported with free software. An abandoned 486 computer with a tiny hard disk will be more than sufficient to make a powerful access point. However, if you really want bragging rights at your next geek meeting, then take a look at custom “single-board computers” that strip out all the unnecessary PC parts like video and keyboard support, video display and hard disk drive controllers. Some manufacturers of these and

similar hardware are:

They use a compact flash card as a hard disk and thus have no moving parts, are very low power, and run silently. You’ll need to add a radio card for wireless support.Wireless radio cards previously come packaged as PC cards (also known as PCMCIA cards). But with the addition of wireless support to laptops, they’re also readily available in a “mini-PCI” format, which is slightly cheaper and somewhat smaller.

When choosing a radio card, you can buy one with more power than a standard laptop wireless card supplies. Generally, laptop cards output 30–50mW of power, but you can buy cards up to 200 mW which can double your range. One popular brand amongst DIY builders is called Senao and is made by Engenius. Use a good search engine to find suppliers, or check with the supplier of your other specialized wireless gear (antenna, pigtails, and so on).

Cool hardware is an expensive (and lousy) boat anchor without software to go with it. Many consumer access points use Linux underneath, and you can too. There are many free distributions tailored specifically for building wireless access points. They include:

There are also some popular commercial suppliers of reasonably priced access point software:

Many Web sites discuss different aspects of building your own access point. Some starting points:

Consumer access point hardware is hard to beat on price, so some people prefer to improve

them instead of starting from scratch. Some popular access points to hack are:

Building and installing an outdoor access point can extend your wireless coverage far beyond what’s possible indoors. This creates exciting opportunities for sharing your coverage with other people or creating completely new uses.

This chapter provided a lot of information to get you started. You’ve learned how to think about location. There’s a detailed list of what equipment to buy and the inherent trade-offs that are necessary. Clever innovations like Power-over-Ethernet simplify your installation. Putting everything together isn’t as simple as it appears. Planning for cooling, weatherproofing, and lightning are important to increase the reliability and safety of your installation.

This may just be the beginning of even more ambitious projects.Take some of the ideas from this chapter and build on them to see how far you can get. Read on to create the ultimate outdoor wireless access point using solar power. The next chapter will show how to take a 75 W solar panel and create a completely stand-alone, totally wireless access point and repeater system. This system can be placed 10 miles or more from the nearest DSL line and doesn’t require any power lines.