Kurt walked over to the nearest shelving unit and grabbed a PC
mini-tower with the lid off. "But did you ever do this?" He stuck the
machine under Alan's nose and swung the gooseneck desk lamp over it. It
was a white-box PC, generic commodity hardware, with a couple of network
cards.
"What's that?"
"It's a junk access point! I made it out of trash! The only thing I
bought were the network cards -- two wireless, one Ethernet. It's
running a FreeBSD distribution off a CD, so the OS can never get
corrupted. It's got lots of sweet stuff in the distro, and all you need
to do is plug it in, point the antennae in opposite directions, and
you're up. It does its own power management, it automagically peers with
other access points if it can find 'em, and it does its own dynamic
channel selection to avoid stepping on other access points."
Alan turned his head this way and that, making admiring noises. "You
made this, huh?"
"For about eighty bucks. It's my fifteenth box. Eventually, I wanna have
a couple hundred of these."
"Ambitious," Alan said, handing the box back. "How do you pay for the
parts you have to buy? Do you have a grant?"
"A grant? Shit, no! I've got a bunch of street kids who come in and take
digital pix of the stuff I have no use for, research them online, and
post them to eBay. I split the take with them.
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