[kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: OpenWRT

[Paul Nijjar]

It's August, which for many of us means it's time to head off to the
cottage. Maybe back in the 1950s you could go to the cottage without
your wifi, but these days canoeing without your laptop or telling
ghost stories without your email is gauche. But now it is 2007, and
mobile broadband is not ubiquitous yet, so you need a wireless router.
Enter the trusty Linksys WRT54GL...

Oh wait. It's not 2007. It's 2014, and even though you probably use
your phone to check email[0]  on your phone, you might well have a
broadband connection someplace, and in 2014 the trusty old WRT54GL is
not cutting it. Now the wireless-N standard is ubiquitous[1], and
people have gigabit networks at home. Sure, some people just buy
whatever router is on sale at the local computer store[2], and use the
stock firmware to distribute their network signal. But what fun is
that? You can't run an OpenVPN endpoint or Asterisk server on stock
firmware. If you haven't noticed, though, wireless routers are
confusing! Some routers don't work well with third-party firmware.
Some routers do work well until the manufacturer changes the revision
and switches all the router internals? Where do you turn if you want a
solid, flashable router that supports modern standards?

You turn to Khalid Baheyeldin, that's who. He went through the odyssey
of finding a router that would work well with the OpenWRT firmware in
2014. Furthermore, he knows how to use his router to track the things
those of us with bandwidth caps care about: which devices are sucking
up the data? How can you see what processes are active at any given
time? Are there pretty graphs? In this presentation Khalid will tell
us all this and more. This presentation will start at 7pm. 

In other news, Software Freedom Day organizing is coming along.
This event will be held on Sept 20, from 10am-4pm. There will be
workshops on the Scratch programming language, installing security and
privacy tools in the post-Snowden era, and building your own Linux
machine. There are also plenty of presentations lined up, including
sessions on making a living with FLOSS and on the Open Access
publishing movement. You can find out more about the day at
http://kwlug.org/sfd , and you can offer to volunteer by contacting
me off-list. (We especially need volunteers to staff our installfest,
and to help with publicity.) 

And that's it. Now I need a vacation, but there is no rest for the
wicked, so attending a KWLUG meeting makes for a pretty good
substitute. Here is the location info:

St John's Kitchen
97 Victoria Street North
(at the corner of Victoria and Weber)
Kitchener

Park your campers in the Worth A Second Look parking lot. Park your
touring bicycle along the side of the building. Find our
sunny destination at http://kwlug.org/sjk . 

- Paul



BONUS: Mean-spirited footnotes, courtesy of my inner critic:

[0] Email? Who uses email? 
[1] Ain't you ever heard of 802.11ac, grandpa?
[2] Local computer store? It's 2014! Bricks and mortar are so 20th century!

-- 
http://pnijjar.freeshell.org