[tech] Wireless update after the cleanup

James French frenchie at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au
Sat Jul 24 19:04:14 WST 2010


Hi All,

Poked UCC's wireless setup a bit today, summary for those who don't
like long posts:

1. UCCsec renamed 'UCC'
2. UniversityComputerClub renamed 'UCC-Public'
3. We no longer rebroadcast SNAP

If you have no interest in the technical bits, you can tl;dr now.

The long term plan for the 'public' wireless is to provide access to a
limited selection of ports useful to the average passer-by's needs
(web, imaps, pop3s, smtps) at full speed for freenets and a shared
shaped pool of bandwidth for non-freenets services. It's likely that
we'll allocate between 256kbit and 512kbit, ie something comfortable
for light webbrowsing for a few people while not opening us up to a
huge liability if people start to leech. We can also drop the speed
way down if very high usage becomes an issue.

There was some debate in the clubroom as to whether or not we should
run a captive portal on the UCC-Public SSID. Comments from the wider
club would be appreciated. The main argument for is that it gives us a
chance to show off T&C and give members configuration instructions for
'UCC'. Against we've got interrupted browser sessions and a general
dislike of captive portals. No work's been done there yet so it's
still a good time to talk about it.

At present however, the UCC-Public SSID is a walled garden, traffic
can only reach UWA hosted services. Attempting to webbrowse outside of
that pops up a webpage letting people know that that's all they can
see and that we're working towards opening it up a bit better in the
not too distant future. That page can be seen externally at
http://www.ucc.asn.au/ucc-public-wireless/. We should probably add
setup instructions for the members-only SSID there.

To facilitate the shuffle, I also made a few other changes about the
place. Notably I retired the dedicated netboot vlan and put the ubuntu
port on vlan 3. Now that the clubroom network does exactly the same
thing wrt netbooting it seemed a bit redundant to duplicate it all on
a rather awkward subnet choice (my bad, c.2006). I've repurposed vlan
8 as the UCC-Public network and given it 172.26.42.0/26  which is
probably address overkill but eh.

Lastly, we no longer rebroadcast SNAP as a certain fruit company's
mobile devices don't have a wifi network preference and tend to pick
that up instead of anything which could possibly be useful. SNAP (and
I imagine its successor) is now available for Tav patrons courtesy of
a new AP which has turned up in Indigenous Studies. As the SNAP
replacement would seem to be just around the corner, us rebroadcasting
SNAP is useful in the very short term only.

F.

Ps. To wheel members: steer clear of the OpenWRT web config, it
doesn't know about radius and will quite happy eat the config and
waste half an hour of your life.


More information about the tech mailing list