Yesterday was the Woking Means Business trade show, we had a stand there so we could show local businesses how they could save money by using Free and Open Source software. Here is a (bad) photo of our computer laden stand. (Alan Bell on the right, Alan Lord is on the left)
on the stand from left to right is a Novatec laptop (they are one of the few suppliers who will sell you a computer without operating system), an Elonex webbook, an OLPC XO laptop, the pink Elonex ONE and on the shelf is a monitor attached to another Novatec laptop and a little Elonex ONEt. All running Free and Open Source software.
We had internet access on all the computers, thanks to another webbook hidden in the cupboard below. The other webbook had an Orange 3G dongle plugged in and was connected to a standard wireless ADSL router (not plugged in to ADSL of course). With a bit of messing about with the settings we got the webbook to act as a NAT router and internet gateway for all the others. We were connected for about 8 hours doing all sorts of things, demonstrating updates and installation of software and using our web based vtiger CRM system. It worked flawlessly and is a really great setup for anyone who wants internet access for a bunch of computers.
To get it working there are a couple of magical incantations required on the webbook, specifically,
sudo sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
to allow it to forward packets from the wireless interface to the mobile broadband interface, and then
sudo iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 192.168.0.0/16 -o hso0 -j MASQUERADE
to set up a firewall rule to do network address translation (NAT) for the 192.168.0.0 subnet (the local network) with the external interface being called hso0 (if you have the Orange dongle the network card is called hso0, if it is 3 or T Mobile then substitute hso0 for ppp0). Finally on all the other computers we had to set their default route to point to the IP address of the webbook with the dongle and also edit their /etc/resolv.conf dns settings to point to the Orange DNS servers, if I had set the webbook up as a DHCP server this could all have been automatic.
Nice photo! NOT.
Here’s a link to some words I wrote back in January about getting Angua (the Novatech Laptop) and how hard it was to find a UK supplier of laptops that would sell them without an Operating System. Scandalous.
http://www.theopensourcerer.com/2008/01/29/microsofts-fixed-rate-tax-approaches-100/
heh.. not a good picture.. but then I’m biased
It’s an interesting point, but then again with these cut-price laptops the buyer really (and I mean really) has to be aware of what they’re buying, and what’s actually left out. I bought an Elonex One because I knew exactly what I was buying, and I’m using it for basic surfing and email, plus some software development. They already have Perl on there and I’ve set up a SQLite database too, so in that respect it’s very useful. The people I feel sorry for though are the (alleged) low-income buyers who expect them to behave like a Windows PC, which it obviously won’t. In educational establishments though, surely a switched-on IT person could set up some useful software on these boxes?
yep, rubbish photo, taken on a dirty two year old camera phone. When I go to the CPW offices they are shocked at the shabby state of my phone!
You had to do all that to get it working, lol, no wonder CPW has junked the linux.
@Dan, they have indeed taken a breather from the Linux build, I hope to bring you some more news on that soon. It has been an educational experience for all concerned.
And the command to make this lovely webbook into a dhcp server is…?
Might be handy for meetings and what not where I need an internet connection for a few colleagues!
Regards,
Matt Dinnery,
Webmaster,
Medical Admissions – Getting you in…
http://www.medicaladmissions.co.uk