Building a network for AMPR

Sun 15 March 2020

Okay, I’m quitting just before I go completely crazy and start shredding things that actually work.

A little background on what I’m working on. I’m trying to build out a little piece of the AMPRnet for me to play with. Mind you, I’m more of a network architect and less of a systems administrator so about half of what I’m trying to do is exciting for me while the other half is quite frustrating.

Yesterday I received my IP allocation (44.60.16.0/27) and today I’ve been trying to stand up a server (VM) that will allow me to host a gateway to bridge my little piece of allocation with others over the Internet and to also be able to host the necessary services needed to run a network. This is all fine and good except FreeNAS, the host I want to run this VM on, is making things…​ difficult. I don’t know, really, if it’s all FreeNAS’s fault but it just seems to do unexpected things with respect to networking, VLANs, handling operating systems, and several other things. So, after fighting with it for most of the day, I’m just going to walk away from it for now. I’ve turned off the VM and maybe a miracle will happen and things will correct itself while it’s sleeping.

What has gone well, though, is the 5 GHz access point (AP) on the roof seems to still be working. When I get some time I want to do some range testing to see what kind of distance I can get out of it. It’s up pretty high but we’re surrounded by trees so I’m not expecting anything great. I need to get some more outdoor gear to experiment with and maybe see if there are any hams in the neighborhood that would like to play as well.

Anyway, here’s hoping that tomorrow goes better. 73 for now.

By Sparks, Category: Radio

Tags: Amateur Radio / AMPR /