Internet at the space

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Hi all,

Apologies for the unreliable internet at the space… please don’t be afraid to complain about it, I’ve been slack keeping an eye on it. The last few weeks of flakiness have been to a botched upgrade of Debian Jessie -> Stretch, which I have now completed and tested that a reboot of the gateway PC does come automatically and give internet without any manual babysitting.

I’ve heard that some members IoT projects were being blamed for the data usage earlier in the year: that’s NOT what has happened here. We are happy for IoT projects to be sitting on the 4G connection: it’s highly unlikely that an ESP8266 will consume much 200-300MB per day, which was the problem we faced around February or so!

I did mention that there has been an “evil twin” open/unsecured wifi network named “MakeHackVoid” popping up occasionally, and I had wondered if one of the ESP8266 projects was bringing up a captive portal as an explanation for this. But if memory serves, the MAC address belonged to an HP device…

The alternative, more paranoid explanation is that somebody is messing with MHV members; it’s not a problem any more, in any case.

So, to recap:

  • Please complain more; perhaps I need to hand out sudo accounts on the gateway box to get help babysitting it
  • Please continue using the internet at the space for making, hacking & voiding warranties, including IoT/embedded/sensor projects if you so wish. Generally, try to do OS updates & netflix elsewhere, unless it’s hackerspace-related.
  • @crashman39 let me know there’s a desire for an alternate 4G connection to be put in alongside the existing setup, that is perfectly fine! This is a do-ocracy and members should feel absolutely free to implement whatever changes they need in order to keep the space functioning.
  • … but whoever “owns” the SIM card for that connection needs to understand the liability & risk that comes with letting random guests & members use an internet connection in their name. Happy to chat further about this if useful.
  • Please feel free to work on/fix the space probe. @devdsp’s code is at https://github.com/devdsp/mhv-spaceprobe-ng - hit me up if you need access to the MQTT server part.

Cheers :slight_smile:

2 Likes
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Thank you for fixing the net and the effort, we will see if we run an alternate 4g setup to run another mqtt setup

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do-ocracy - I like it=)

I was wondering about something more insidious wrt the wireless usage. Theft (of internet for personal use by a third party) or hijacking for a distributed, nefarious act.

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I did have nftop running to track which IPs/MACs are using what internet, perhaps I’ll reinstate it.