[CUWiN-Dev] Re: much simpler upgrades

[tom]

It does seem like a silly problem to have. I found a couple freeware 
programs that will take a look at your network and tell you what's there, 
but they seem to mainly find NetBIOS-related things; none of them proved any 
help last night. The arp table didn't help, either (the command is 'arp -a' 
which displays the table), it was empty when I ran it.

The downloads page (http://www.cuwireless.net/downloads/index.html#cdrom) 
still says that the COM1 port is the console, but I don't know if that just 
hasn't been changed recently. If that is the case, it doesn't really lend 
itself to field work, because I suppose I'd have to carry around two laptops 
that both have serial ports.

In a similar vein, would just booting into some other *nix distro solve the 
IP location problem? It seems like way overkill, but Knoppix or what have 
you could be used to do a broadcast ping, run sshd, etc. I don't know how 
hard it would be to get wireless cards working (I don't know what kind of 
built in support there is in a stripped-down distribution).

Tom


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bryan Cribbs" <bdcribbs at ojctech.com>
To: "tom" <tom at anotherwastedday.com>
Cc: <cu-wireless-dev at cuwireless.net>
Sent: Saturday, March 19, 2005 11:03 AM
Subject: Re: much simpler upgrades


* tom <tom at anotherwastedday.com> :
> I went by the node at 707 Race last night just to see how far I could get,
> but ran into the expected problem of not being able to identify the exact 
> IP
> address of the node. I could see both the cuwireless.net and cuw networks,
> but short of doing an ip scan on the entire range (169.254.0.0 to
> 169.254.254.254, which would take forever) I couldn't think of a good way 
> to
> determine the node's IP.

For the benefit of those who haven't tried this, sending one or
two broadcast pings to the subnet is one way to find your neighbors,
but that doesn't seem to work using windows (or cygwin).
I guess the arp table didn't help? (I don't recall the Windows
command to see it).
This seems like a silly problem to have, but I don't know how, in
Windows (even with cygwin) to find the IP of that node you know
is right in front of you.

BTW, older images (certainly the SSID cuw ones) will not have the
169.254. alias, but will be reachable on 10.0.

> This idea of turning a laptop into a mobile node seems promising, so I
> thought I would try it out. Using the 0.5.5 image that's on the
> cuwireless.net page, I made a bootable CD and booted to it, but after
> announcing its doing the primary bootstrap it just sits there. I seem to
> recall that it's supposed to take a while, but how long are talking? 
> What's
> supposed to happen, will it give me a command line?

Hmm.. that sounds like maybe it's still trying to use the serial
port as it's console, but the recent published ISO images should
not be doing that.

> Tom
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Bryan Cribbs" <bdcribbs at ojctech.com>
> To: "tom" <tom at anotherwastedday.com>
> Cc: <cu-wireless-dev at cuwireless.net>
> Sent: Friday, March 18, 2005 11:12 PM
> Subject: much simpler upgrades
>
>
> Tom, you mentioned you might try and do some on-air
> upgrades this weekend, even though we didn't sort out
> the Windows configuration issues on Thursday.
>
> I realized there is a much simpler way we could facilitate
> using any i386 laptop to do upgrades, without requiring
> installing or configuring anything at all on it.
>
> If you boot a laptop off a CD with a CUWiN image, you
> become a walking CUWiN node, automatically meshing with
> other CUWiN nodes, already running an sshd.
> The CUWiN CD has plenty of free space to hold a copy of
> the upgrade tgz file, and that's easy to add to the build.
>
> Can anyone see downsides to this?
>
> -Bryan
>