Weekend Gedankenexperiment - The Kill Switch

Fri Feb 4 04:46:47 UTC 2011

On Feb 3, 2011, at 10:10 PM, Jay Ashworth wrote:

> ---- Original Message -----
>> What do you do when you get home to put it back on the air -- let's
>> say email as a base service, since it is -- do you have the gear laying around,
>> and how long would it take?
> 
> Focus on this part, BTW, folks; let's ignore the politics behind the
> shutdown.  :-)
> 

So if I get what you're saying, I could have something operational from scratch in a few hours.  I've got a variety of Cisco routers and switches, Linux and Mac OS X boxes in various shapes and sizes, and a five CPE + one AP 5 GHz Mikrotik RouterOS-based radio system, 802.11b/g wireless AP, 800' of Cat 5e cable, connectors, and crimpers.  The radios, if well placed, could allow me to connect up several strategic locations, or perhaps use them to connect to other sources of Internet access, if available.  If it really came down to it, I could probably gather enough satellite communications gear from the office to allow me to stand up satellite Internet to someone.  Of course, the trick would be to talk to that "someone" to coordinate connectivity over the satellite which may be hard to do given the communications outage you described.  I wouldn't be so worried about transmitting to the satellite, in this case I'd just transmit without authorization, but someone needs to be receiving my transmission and vice versa for this to be useful.  At a minimum, I could enable communications between my neighbors.

Regards,
Ryan Wilkins