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.