Editing KansasCity/July2012Hack (section)

==== Tuesday July 10th, 2012 ====

Made plans for a dual FreedomTower arrangement with a single radio uplink, with
point to point links between all three stations. Didn't have enough equipment
to additionally build out Commotion-based mesh networks off each FreedomTower,
so we went shopping for several slow hours at Microcenter (an
electronics/computer department store). Even using openwrt.org and wikidevi.com
wikis from in-store computers it was hard to find fully supported equipment
that was in stock and at a reasonable price, even though the available
selection was large.

In the afternoon we spent several hours getting new equipment working, with
limited success. Linux device driver support is pretty good these days, but
they are frequently non-free or not in the default installation.  Lesson
(re)learned: use "consensus" hardware and order it from the online stores or
ebay.

We installed pfSense on a second foxconn nettop computer (requiring monitor
and keyboard), and compiled OpenWrt from scratch to see how that process goes
(pretty smoothly!), thinking we might have to rebuild the Commotion firmware
built on top of OpenWrt at some point to support new hardware platforms. We
adopted the Transit, Distribution, Access, Edge terminology