With winter on the way, one thing I really had to sort out was heating for the garage, especially on the summer house side.  The insulation in the walls and ceiling is working well, but with outdoor temperatures dropping to single digits I really needed something to raise the temperature in the winter evenings.

I had looked at various wee fan heaters and oil heaters but nothing seemed quite right for the project.  Then I happened to find a nice glass panel heater in the B&Q sale.   It seemed to tick all of the boxes: not too thirsty (max 1kW); compact; wall mounted; silent… and best of all it’s digital!

It’s ideal for the summer house, just turn it on and it quickly heats the room to the chosen temperature — 12c to 19c takes about ten minutes — then it just maintains that temperature for as long as you’re out there.  The loft insulation seems to be doing it’s job, as the heating element only comes on very occasionally once the room is up to temperature.

And now for the missing link… high-speed internet access!

Even though the garage is only a few meters from the house and approx 15m from the wi-fi antenna in the loft, the metal foil insulation used throughout the garage prevents a decent wi-fi signal from getting through.   I’d occasionally manage to get a connection from my laptop, but it was flaky.   And a connection from my iPhone… forget it!

I didn’t want to run a hard-wired Ethernet connection from the house, so I decided to set up a wi-fi repeater instead, taking the signal from outside the metallic cage and repeating it inside.   I’m already running the dd-wrt custom firmware on my main router and had read good things about its Repeater Bridge mode for this kind of task.   So, I decided to look for the cheapest dd-wrt compatible router I could find to act as the repeater.

I found an ex-display Buffalo AirStation WHR-G125 on ebuyer for £15 which was perfect for the task.  Once it arrived I used tftp to flash it with the latest dd-wrt Mini Generic firmware from the dd-wrt site, then followed this tutorial to set it up in Repeater Bridge mode.

All that was left was to give it a permanent mounting place in the garage.  The WHR-G125 doesn’t have any mounting holes as standard and I was reluctant to spend extra on the official wall mount, so I ended up strapping it onto the roof joists with a couple of zip ties.  The result: the garage now has it’s own SSID which broadcasts a nice strong signal to any devices out there and gives me reliable wi-fi in the garage and elsewhere in the garden.  £15 well spent I think.

If you’ve read this blog in the past you might know that I’ve been a fan of the Fon social wifi project for a while.  To be honest, I didn’t think much of the first gen hacked Linksys routers, but their more recent customised hardware, La Fonera, with it’s dual SSID is a much better device.  La Fonera is good, but still suffers the limited range of other 802.11b/g devices.  It’s fine around the house, but doesn’t extend far beyond so it’s use as a ’social’ hotspot is limited. 

The guys at Fon are clearly very aware of this, so they’ve developed La Fontenna, a wifi antenna you plug into your Fonera to increase it’s effective range.  The Fon guys say it will multiply your signal by 5x, and I wanted to see if that was true. 

My Fonera unit sits in a cupboard with my other networking gear, roughly in the middle of my house.  To reach the garden the signal has to go through two internal brick walls and one external wall, also brick.  For this test I was using my Acer laptop’s built-in 802.11g.

Before Fontenna

Before the upgrade the effective range of my laptop was just over 13 metres (42ft) from the hotspot.  After this distance the signal seemed to drop off sharply — literally taking two steps backward stopped me loading a web page in its tracks.

After Fontenna

Installation of La Fontenna was a one minute job.  Simply unscrew the existing antenna and replace it with La Fontenna.  Back out in the garden I started walking….

Signal strength & quality were excellent at the point where the signal had died before.  At twice the distance the connection was still great.  It was finally at 31 metres (101ft) that connection quality finally dropped.   As with the standard antenna, once you step outside of range you lose your connection pretty quickly.

Conclusion

Admitedly this test wasn’t at all scientific, but hopefully provides some useful ‘real world’ information for anyone considering upgrading to La Fontenna, or even just getting involved in the Fon social wifi project in the first place.

I read about the Fon Social Router project (the largest wifi community in the world) a while ago.  It seemed like an excellent idea - share your broadband with the lcoal community and in exchange you can surf the web worldwide, free of charge.  When they got some financial backing from Google and dropped the price of their router to $5 (about £2.75) I thought it was worth a go. 

After all, my old Linksys router was becoming a bit unstable and I thought a new, Linux-based Linksys router would be more reliable and more configurable.  And paying just £2.75 for a £50 router (model WRT54GL) - how can you go wrong with that?

Delivery of my router was reasonably quick (even though they were quoting something like 4-6 weeks on the site) and setup was straightforward.  With just ten minutes down-time to my home web server I’d switched the plugs, restarted everything and was up and running. 

Time for a quick check…

• Web access - ok
• Remote desktop - ok
• Network storage - ok (after a couple of restarts of the LinkStation)
• Web server - no response

It turns out Fon’s software doesn’t support ‘loopback’ or whatever you call the thing that lets your web requests go external before resolving back to the internal network.  So no more accessing www.grantgibson.co.uk from inside the house, or following links to it from other sites.   I could live with this though, all I had to do was remember to access it via its local network name at home.

The next test was wifi access.  I’ve got a couple of wifi devices at home - a Shuttle Media Centre PC and an iPAQ handheld PDA.  Both were able to connect easily enough, but before they could access the internet they had to log on to the fon router via a web interface.  Fair enough - I entered my username and password and ticked the ‘remember me’ option.  I was online and everything was cool - until I restarted.  Even with the ‘remember me’ option ticked, you have to go via the fon access page every time you restart the computer. 

Although this might not sound too inconvenient, it takes away some of the benefits of a Media Centre PC.  With a normal router in action you can start up, navigate and shut down a Media Centre all from the remote.  With the FON installed you need to get the keyboard and mouse out every time you start, just to access your local network file store.

On the PDA it’s just as much of a drag.  The FON login page is optimised for modern desktop browswers and doesn’t degrade well on PDAs at all.  Logging in on that tiny screen is a chore, espeicially if you weren’t going online to use the web.  The PDA has loads of great features like network music access, PC remote control and TomTom live traffic updates - but they’re only worthwhile if they happen seamlessly - not after a laborious login process.

My Nabaztag wifi bunny is also out of the question - it requires wifi access but has no facility for inputting login credentials on a web page (although it has an impressive list of security options via its own web interface).

The final nail in the coffin for my FON was the fact that you must select whether all wifi users (even those who have paid for guest access outside your home) get access to your LAN, or if they only get access to the internet.  At the default setting of internet-only, the router is relatively secure but useless.  Without LAN access from my Media Centre PC I can’t access any of my videos or music stored on the network.  Similarly, the PDA has no way to talk to the other PCs. 

With LAN access enabled, functionality is restored, but at a huge cost to security.  Obviously with a public access point you can’t have any meaningful security (turning off SSID broadcast or requiring a WEP key is out of the question) so literally anyone on the street could pay $2 to browse my entire home network.

Unless FON can provide a MUCH more configurable firmware, with lists of security exceptions - perhaps based on MAC addresses - then there’s really no way I could make use of it again.  Unless I flash it back to Linksys default…

Update (20/09/06): Om Malik just posted about a new Fon router that has two wireless channels allowing separation of public and private networks.  This has the potential to overcome many of the problems I’ve outlined above.  Sounds interesting - if you try one please let me know how well it works.