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Choosing the Equipment


Choosing the Equipment

The bus ride home was uneventful for Saul. He was tired and hungry. Saul walked straight to his room to go back over all the information he had gathered over the last couple of weeks. Sitting on the bed, he pulled out his laptop and papers and inspected what he had.

There was the map of the area around the hospital and the propagation of its wireless network. He had the username and password of a hospital access point. The Nmap scans of the wireless network that identified the access points was on his laptop along with the traffic he had managed to capture from his sniffing activities. All in all, it was a successful day, but the hard work was just getting started.

The fact that the hospital was using AP-1000 hardware for their network meant that Saul needed to use the same hardware for his rogue access points. It wasn t required, but using the same hardware made the work a lot simpler. With time being a huge issue there was wisdom in keeping things simple. Saul decided he would ask for more AP-1000s to maintain consistency.

The choice of antennas was fairly easy as well. The space around the hospital was wide open due to the plaza and Saul knew that meant that he could use a higher gain antenna. This would effectively expand the range of the wireless signal. He opted to use standard 8dbi gain omnidirectional antennas. Omnidirectional antennas would allow the wireless signal to travel in a 360 degree circle around the antenna.

So Knuth needed to know what Saul needed. He decided it wasn t prudent to tell Knuth all the details he had over e-mail, just in case the administrators at the hospital were nosey. Instead, he decided to keep it simple.

Knuth,
The project is going well. Thank you. I need the
following supplies to complete it. 

5 Lucent AP-1000 access points 
10 ORiNOCO Gold wireless PCMCIA cards
5 8dbi omni antennas that operate in the 2.400  2.440 Ghz range with N type
female connections
5 pigtail connectors with an ORiNOCO connection on one end and an N type
male connector on the other.

Saul

He finished typing his e-mail to Knuth and hit Send. It had been a long day and Saul was ready for dinner. Contacting his friends for help placing the new access points could wait until tomorrow. For now, he was going to get some food and relax.



Working with Friends

The next morning, Saul woke up early and got online. The plan was laid out and the equipment was ordered. Saul was satisfied with the way things were going up to this point. The next step was to e-mail the group and see if any one of the other kids in the group lived near the hospital or had connections there.

Saul decided to sell the idea to the group as a test of wireless network bridging. The fact that the hospital was in such an open area made it attractive for a project like this. Explaining the fact that the access points would be in place for only a few weeks, Saul asked his friends if they could help. He hoped that with such a large group to work with, at least some of the kids would have access to the area.

His e-mail went out to the entire group and Saul spent the day in his house waiting for responses. He was surprised to find that he got four responses from his group members. Two individuals lived in the area because their parents worked at the hospital. Two other members worked at shops or caf s in the area and could easily arrange to help Saul out.

The equipment showed up on his doorstep two days later and included everything that Saul had requested . Carefully he started unpacking boxes and laid the items in small piles around his room. After double-checking that he had the right number of each item, Saul pulled the laptop from backpack and grabbed a network cable. He knew that he needed to list the MAC addresses of each access point and set them up for bridging mode.

Over the next two days, Saul worked with his friends to get the access points in place and ensure they were working. According to his rudimentary calculations, the range of the hospital s wireless network would be nearly doubled , which was his original goal. Next, he needed to start generating traffic on the network.

Saul sent an e-mail to everyone on the list giving them the information required to connect to the network. He told them that the SSID was stjames and the WEP key was st.james-hosp. Set up your network for DHCP because the hospital hands out IP addresses automatically, Saul told them in his e-mail. Please test the network as much as possible over the next couple of weeks.