Monday, March 26, 2007

My Own Mesh Node - Meraki comes through!

Here is the view from my roof of downtown San Francisco. Looks like a good place for a Mesh Node!


Last Thursday, Ben Chambers and Jessica showed up on my doorstep from Meraki Networks with APs in hand. I was psyched! We were about to hook up an outdoor node to the Meraki San Francisco trial.

They brought over a Meraki outdoor AP, a toolbox and a lot of cable and got right to work. We went up on the roof to check it out and find a spot to put it. Then we went indoors and talked about how/where to bring the cable in. The unit is powered by a proprietary POE (Power over Ethernet) injector which I plugged and hooked up to my switch.


Ben went back up onto the roof and connect the AP to a plumbing vent pipe. It came with what appears to be a 12dbi antenna (I will check and get back with the details).


It got link and pulled a DHCP address from my home router and started broadcasting the SSID FreeTheNet and we were done.














We chatted awhile and then they left. The were super nice and obviously loved their jobs. Later the unit started upgrading itself and is now running a newer OS than what it originally had. I checked that evening and found I was up on the website at http://sf.meraki.net/ but unfortunately none of my neighbors had a Meraki node close enough to attach to mine. I am going to drop in on Ritual Coffee later this week and get them to join the network as well as some of my neighbors.



2 comments:

  1. Hi, my name is Carlos. I got outdoor mini too...just thought I would drop in a line.
    http://greatbusinessman.vox.com/

    I am on Steiner and Page.

    Maybe we can have coffee too. And yes Ben and Jessica were soo nice. Funny thing I ran into Jessica today, and she gave me a hug and all. Well talk to you soon.

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  2. Bruce, I have been noticing the Meraki posters around the Mission District lately and thought the project would make an interesting post on sf.metblogs.com, where I am one of the regular bloggers. In addition to the inteview with them I am trying to get, I would be interested in talking to you about your experience with them.

    Mark Pritchard
    mark[dot]pritchard[at]gmail[dot]com

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