Punting from the 1…

Well, some unexpected things have happened that pushed us back to 4th and long at our 1… I managed to acquire the USB800, and once it arrived I immediately plugged it into the USB extension I had the MF861 plugged into and… it went into a boot loop with pfSense. I was understandably somewhat disappointed ... Read More

Next Steps and 2020 Preview

We are back, and things are proceeding nicely with the internet in a Box rebuild: the new apu2d0 arrived and is running pfSense with an IPsec tunnel back to the datacenter firewall. Also new is the LTE modem in use: ZTE’s MF861 “Velocity USB Stick”. However, this will ultimately be replaced with the Inseego Global ... Read More

LTE Success and Looking Forward

It’s been a week since I returned from AWA, and while this won’t be a full con report post, it is a report that we had smashingly good success with the LTE solution. In fact, it was pretty flawless all things considered. The highest speed was 35 Mbps, and as long as nobody wanted to ... Read More

Results of Testing and Miscellany

I drove over to the Galleria area yesterday afternoon to conduct preliminary speed tests, and the results are promising. The MR1100 was locked on Band 66 when I left the house, so I tested there once arriving and speeds were around 10 Mbps. Thinking there was room for improvement, I changed the MR1100 to Carrier ... Read More

Channeling GLaDOS

We’re back! It’s been a while since I posted here, and we’ve had a few changes. First off, I now have AT&T for my mobile phone service! And summarily I am leveraging one of their iPad LTE SIMs for LTE in Internet in a Box now. As the post title implies, I am doing copious ... Read More

Internet in a Box Status

The past two years’ Anime Weekends Atlanta made use of the updated Internet in a Box hinted at in a previous post with good success. The only gotcha we encountered in 2017 was having to reboot the GrooveA once a day: I’ve yet to actually do a similar test with my home network to see ... Read More

AWA Hotel Room Network Evolution

I’ve been attending Anime Weekend Atlanta since 2004, and since 2005 I’ve gotten a hotel room that I share with friends to facilitate out-of-town friends attending, in addition to giving us a “home base” to keep our things in during the convention. As such, we’ve needed methods to get online. As the years went on, ... Read More

Internet in a Box, Rev. A (Part 1)

In the last post I discussed the current-at-the-time state of my “Internet in a Box” project. As it’s been ten months since then, I felt an update was warranted. Since that post was published, the system has been taken on five trips for work or leisure, and each of those had its own set of ... Read More

Internet in a Box

Oh, it’s been far too long since I’ve posted in this blog, forgive me! Over the years I’ve have this idea floating around in my head to create what I dubbed “Internet in a Box” to take on my annual convention trip with friends. The initial idea, circa early 2010, was a rather unwieldy wooden ... Read More

WB4HRO “Portable” D-STAR Repeater

D-STAR is a digital voice mode for amateur radio, and one of its neatest features is seamless VoIP. Obviously, this requires the repeater to have an Internet connection of some sort, which is easier said than done for many repeater sites. The repeater I manage, WB4HRO, has the luxury of living in an office with ... Read More