Michael Polák ( )
Přečteno 202663x, 19 komentářů, rubrika: (en) Fellowship

Sorry for not releasing new Arachne for such a long time. The main reason for this delay is CZFree.Net - community network in Prague, based mostly on Wi-fi technology...

Project of non-profit wireless broadband community network called www.czfree.net is based mainly (but not exclusively) on Wi-Fi technology. Arachne Labs recently opened partly commercial Internet Gateway called Prometheus, serving this basicaly non-profit network, supporing growth of community network infrastructure in our part of Prague.

CZFree.Net coordinates private IP space 10.0.0.0/8 on nation-wide scale in Czech Republic. Being private IP-based network, CZFree.Net cannot be reached from public Internet - but public Internet access is possible using internet gateways, routers which do NAT between private and public IP space. Internet gateways subsidize free connectivity to operators of Wi-Fi APs who join the network, and sell connectivity to other members. Traffic routed internaly betwen members of community network is free of charge, by definition. I believe the way Prague enthusiasts launched community wireless networking can be model for many other cities. I have found many links at www.wirelessanarchy.com, but no other city seems to be runnning as huge community network as Prague. There are already as long routes as 10 or even 15 hops all accross our wireless infrastructure, owned by hundereds of members - and you can download data from other part of city completely free of charge, at real data transfer rates close to 1Mbit. This beats ADSL offer of Czech Telecom in many cases.

Hard work on building and operating our part of CZFree.Net infrastructure is one of reasons, why GNU-licensed version of Arachne was not yet packaged and released. Anyway, new web pages, and new, fuly open-source and GNU-licensed version of Arachne is one of our plans for near future.

In future, Arachne Labs will focus on webosting, application hosting, open source project hosting (CVS), operating Wi-Fi networks and development and support of Linux applications - instead of development od DOS web browser. This will be confirmed by release of Arachne WWW browser in "museum" section of our new web site, which will focuse on open-source release of all our technologies and allowing instant user feedback in online discussion forums.

We will also move Arachne Labs homepage to new server soon. Problems with arachne mailing list will be fixed by moving from older mailserver called sendmail and listserver majordomo to new solution based on modern mailserver called postifx.