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[ Second Test Results (Pics!)] - September 19, 2006

June 9, 2008 - Wifi running in test mode!

The two nodes are located on Dresden Row, close to the Morris Street intersection, and at Spencer House, on Morris Street and Birmingham Street. Each of these nodes has a range of about 1/2 to 3/4 of a block. The Spencer House node unfortunately seems to have had its electricity wired into a switch so at this time it gets turned off after weekday working hours. We will be looking into this shortly. The Dresden Row node is live 24 hours.

All that remains on our to-do list technically is to sort out the "I Agree to the Chebucto Community Net terms of use" button on the free service.

The Chebucto Community Net User Agreement still needs to be modified slightly to add a No Networking or Internet Connection Sharing clause covering the prohibition of networked computers on the Chebucto Wireless service. All computers using the full Chebucto Wireless service have to be logged into an individual Chebucto Plus account. Since this is only $125 a year and is needed to fund the service in the first place, we want to make it clear to all our users that this is a reasonable price for the service and the alternative is to steal from a charity.

We hope to be adding more nodes to the network soon. Residents in the South Park Street/Morris Street/Queen Street/Clyde Street area of south-end Halifax should think about signing up to host nodes and anyone within range of one of our active nodes should think about signing up for our Chebucto Plus service and getting community-run non-profit highspeed Internet for just $125 a year!

February 20, 2008 - The last few months

At first the trouble came from the fact that the majority of wireless hardware has drivers only for Windows, requiring use of wrapper software in Linux which tends to lock up. Most of the computers donated to us for use as nodes are the same model, which despite our best efforts (flashing various BIOS updates, etc.) would not automatically reboot after a power outage. In power-outage prone Nova Scotia, this is a bit of a show stopper and we lost months to trying to make these computers work properly.

For the last several months we have been working on using virtualization software (a software version of a computer running independently within the physical computer) to overcome stability issues with mixed success. The idea would be that the node software would run on the virtual machine and should it crash, the virtual machine could be auto-restarted by the physical machine. Nice idea but unfortunately the physical machine tends to also lockup requiring a physical reboot.

Back to the old drawing board, yet again.

While this was going on, we continued to run a test signal from the top of Fenwick Place. We noticed that the transmitter, which is housed on an outside wall, kept resetting itself. Eventually we figured out that it was cold weather-related so we added a heater to the enclosure, which appears to have sorted this issue out. More time lost.

As time passed development of other wireless software continued and software packages we had initially rejected as lacking critical features have become more stable and added necessary-to-us capabilities. We are currently developing and testing a new version of the node software that is looking very promising. With some good news finally on the horizon, we're updating the stale project and news pages.

Development work on the Chebucto Wireless service has been very difficult. There has been no money for development, which on the one hand limits us to having to work with (literally) garbage computers for hardware among other problems. On the other hand, we've gotten pretty good at making something from nothing, which has its own rewards over time.

While working on the development of the wireless project, the two of us here in the Chebucto office have also had to deal with the incredible multitude of problems that occur every day with the full time job of keeping an Internet Service Provider in operation. People have no tolerance for any shortcoming at all. Each and every day we are expected to provide perfect service - nothing less is acceptable to users. Mail cannot be delayed, web pages must be fast to load, all problems are expected to be diagnosed and overcome instantly.

While this is ongoing, thanks to aggressive and dare I say predatory marketing by the two local large ISPs, we are having to do it all with the support of fewer people, less money and time running out on us. We announced this project to our users two years ago and in that time we have been expected to do more and more with less and less. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that this is not sustainable in the long run.

Still, we are not giving up. Want to help? If you have technical skills with wireless internet providing, are familiar with Open Source technologies and can hit the ground running without having to have a lot of hand-holding, contact us.

If you are not technical, you can donate money to the Chebucto Community Net and it is tax-deductible. We can use the help. What we are planning to offer is unlike anything else being offered anywhere else and there are communities all over the country interested in our wireless project. World class technical development is supposed to be one of the points of pride in our "Smart City".

Want to get more involved? The Chebucto Community Net is overseen by a twelve member Board of Directors. This is an unpaid volunteer position open to all members of the Chebucto Community Net and it is vital we have the participation of the public if we are going to continue. The next Chebucto Community Net Society Annual General Meeting is set for April. Contact us here.

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