Weekend Gedankenexperiment - The Kill Switch

Sun Feb 6 14:57:06 UTC 2011

do you have a satellite dish? what are your dish pointing coordinates......we 
just need to find out what is going on the air interface  ...

________________________________
From: Ryan Wilkins <ryan at deadfrog.net>
To: Jay Ashworth <jra at baylink.com>
Cc: NANOG <nanog at nanog.org>
Sent: Fri, February 4, 2011 4:46:47 AM
Subject: Re: Weekend Gedankenexperiment - The Kill Switch

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