as promised and within the 16hours deadline the kOlga is back online. The new feature set installation (hotspot, gardenwall, red queueing on all interfaces, etc) is postoponed for the future.
Enjoy the beautiful saturday and the weekend 
PS1. The tzikis link was decommissioned due to poor performance (4mbps up 4mbps down) but may be brought back if noone else provides a link for him.
PS2. To the guy that broadcasts in southwest patra region with mac address : 00:0B:6B:09:F2:7E and hidden SSID @ 5180Mhz please contact me if you interested for a link. My scans indicate a very good signal from your side (-55dbi with SNR of 50db)
the wifi node due to maintenance is down and will be down for at least 16hours.
There will be installed new ap cards, new casing and some new cool features.
My apologies for the inconvenience
Cheers
It sounds like an intriguing combination, doesn’t it?
A while ago a pwmn’s intranet web search service was provided [the announcement was made here]. The application providing the service is yacy [1], which might be a bit immature, but was choosen for its future scalability (wifi link with awmn[2] is on the verge and new nodes in between peloponesse and central greece are emerging [3][4][5][6][7]). So the distributed application seemed great idea.
So far the whole service is based in out of stock yacy distribution with the tampering of some configuration files ( defaults/yacy.init , defaults/yacy.network.group ) and the addition of some more ( defaults/yacy.network.pwmn.unit ). The whole idea is to run some sort of the yacy’s freeworld (now named PWMN) over the wireless wifi given the principle of locality[8].
The service had good response among people and some started using in various ways. It was time to bring it closer to the masses and to make it accessible through our number one instant messaging protocol which is no other than irc [9]. The task was to provide itmy’s[10] python irc bot[11][12] with some “API” in order to communicate with the yacy search engine. Since the bot was written in python the easiest way to bind these things was the “glue” application between the bot and the search engine was through the python language. Here I have to say that even though I’m a newbie python programmer I continue using it, in favour of other languages that I prefer more. I guess the main reason is that its learning curve is GoDLiKe!
The following code is quite dumb. Since yacy 0.77stable the developers of yacy provide an xml compliant output (in contrast to html parsing currently done, so many of the following code needs rewritting [13], to eliminate the usage of mechanize in favour of urllib2 and some beautification on the tag parsing of the xml file - currently I’m parsing the html output of www server, so I consider the current version to be totally UGLY 
). Download the source code from here and enjoy
After a while trying establishing a new link among korki[1] and hawk[2], today the seed was grown. Since some rearrangement took place over tzikis roof (this guy had the worst cable management and efficiency I’ve seen ever) The link is pretty solid in at tzikis part. I have to align better but the results are quite cool for a first connection and given that his part isn’t at full height while mine isn’t the best alignment (-79 ~ -82 dbi)
OSPF and other thingies are setup and the only important thing is for tzikis to provide for some service and to organize his local lan (his subnetting skills are … )
Please welcome 10.140.31.0/24 to the network and with him the Panoulix (welcome back dude)
Cheers
Last friday some folks (including me) did an unofficial presentation of the pwmn @ upatras. The attendance was quite unexpected, and while the joke among the workgroup that planned the “event” was that there would be more pwmn members than students, the people that came was suprisingly high!
The purpose of the presentation was to intrigue students to participate to the open/free community called pwmn, and to give them some insight info about it, just in case they would like to get involved.
One of the major concerns back in my days when I was intrested in wireless technologies was the speed (aka Need For Speed. How fast one can download stuff was my primary concern, and the second reason that made me establish a core node. (The first was the companionship among friends). Yet nowdays people such concerns are no issue! And I am actully wondering why? Are we so congested by the “high speed” dsl (namely 24mbit ~ actual 10mbps? Aren’t we intrigued by wireless bandwidth?
On the other hand the people that participated ware more intrested in the wifi technologies in use like the OS running in the routers, the routing protocols, the parameters of linking among different areas, and how the linking can be achieved. Wow! totally different generation…
** I will update this article at some point with photos from the “event” and other thoughts about the event
Kolga despite the wikipedia definition [1] is something existing in this world(earth).
It is a wireless node located in the city of Patras [2] [3] participating in the public/open/free wireless metropolitan network named PWMN. It’s exact position is in the eastern part of the Olga’s square [4]. It’s operator and maintainer is the writer of this article (and generally of this blog) and his details are here.
The node’s name was originally selected because of the asteroid, but since then most people of this world are interested in the node.Writer’s guess is that the node should have 6 or 7 people interested in its operation, while the asteroid maybe has one or two intrested in its existance 
So dear visitors coming here from google bear in mind; that the node has no affiliation nor sponsorship from the asteroid.
Cheers!
After some rearrangements and link tune up the kolga-under link (operating on 5Ghz band) has stable throughput of 4,3Mbyte/s, which is kind cool since the rx power is at 3db fixed (while the max card capabilities are 17dbs).
So an eco-friendly link while maintaining its high throughput is as always an option and users should be encouraged to maintain such links.
Some real world application data transfers will be demonstrated in this article in future (as an article update) as well as the necessary software tuneups (mikrotik) in order for such a boost to take place.
Announcement to all users.
The kolga node due to some upgrades is and will remain inactive today (all the links are or will be down as well as the Access Point). The services offered and the link status will be restored (hopefully) at the end of the day.
For any new Information streams or any other status update this post will be updated.
From the management…
Recently a scramble bot appeared to the #room channel, and everyone was thrilled with it. Epic wars took place in order to make the best score @ the (un)scramble game.
One day a user appeared with huge capabilities and an even greater vocabulary build. We suspected at once that the user was using a bot and we decided to create a counter-bot that could defeat that user. The intention of the team[1] was not to create a second irc bot that would trick the irc channel’s users into thinking that the user was playing legitimately but instead to prove that the BOTs existed and everyone with more or less technical/programming skills could beat every kind of competition using some intuitive thinking.
The above philosophical ideas formed into a solid and working bot called specialK a bot that operates at #room of HWN network (joining information in greek can be found here).
On the build of the bot there aren’t much to write about; some techniques that lead to O(1) searches on the lexicon used and some other preprocessing techniques that make that search time possible[2]. The irc framework was based on the pirc bot framework and the lexikon in use is the cracklib-small provided by gentoo.
[1] For this project I worked with mr bug is found in RandomAccessFile Undertaker. Synergy produces great results 
[2] More technical details (including the produced source code under GPL3 and maybe an executable) will be posted when the final botwar take place, and a winner is established at the botwar competition.
Ο κόμβος pwmn.net-kOlga προσφέρει σε φίλους/φίλες που επιθυμούν να συνδεθούν προσωρινά, στον κορμό του PWMN μέσω internet την δυνατότητα να χρησιμοποιήσουν την υπηρεσία του VPN (PPTP)που προσφέρει ο κόμβος. Η κάθε σύνδεση λαμβάνει dedicated 256kbps upload 128 kbps download (το bandwidth αυτό δίδεται από την dsl που εξυπηρετεί το σπίτι). Η ταχύτητα διασύνδεσης με τον κορμό του PWMN ανέρχεται στα 4 MByte/s οπότε το bottleneck που υπάρχει περίπτωση να αντιμέτωπίσετε θα οφείλεται αποκλειστικά στην dsl. Για πληροφορίες και για account παρακαλώ επικοινωνήστε μέσω του forum με προσωπικό μήνυμα.
Η σύνδεση γίνεται στο address korki.pwmn.net και τα user credential δίδονται από το forum. Κατά την λειτουργία κανείς περιορισμός δεν υφίσταται, ως προς το είδος της κίνησης που επιθυμεί να περάσει ο πελάτης [1] . Οι αποδιδόμενες διευθύνσεις από για το VPN είναι στο range 10.140.4.240/28. Επίσης προαιρετικά και μετά από συνεννόηση εκτός από συνδέσεις τύπου PPTP μπορεί να δίδονται συνδέσεις τύπου OpenVPN και IPsec (tunneled).
Στις ρυθμίσεις για το PPTP πρέπει υποχρεωτικά να είναι ενεργοποιημένη η επιλογή για 128bit encryption.
Another happy service by pwmn.net-kOlga.
[1] Προσοχή: όλη η κίνηση περνάει μέσα από το snort οπότε ύποπτες δραστηριότητες -όπως μπορεί να της θεωρήσει ή εφαρμογή- μπορεί να διακοπούν κατά το δοκούν του IDS.