DSL and USB and Stand Alone

Forum: DSL Ideas and Suggestions
Topic: DSL and USB and Stand Alone
started by: shdawson

Posted by shdawson on Sep. 16 2006,19:14

Hi,

Writing with an idea that may work for everyone.

DynDNS updater (http://www.dyndns.com/support/clients/) is a good tool for keeping current with their database. I agree with you that routers often do not update on a frequent enough basis, particularly after a restart of the router.

I have a friend who uses DynDNS service with a rental property of his. He has a router with WAP at that property for his rental customers to have ISP while they are there. He purchased an IP camera to watch his property through the web at his home, as he was broken into a while back and lost some furnishings. I put everything together for him and it works great. We put everything on a power strip and the power strip into a timer that power cycles once a week in the middle of the night. This is for 2 reasons. 1, to allow the router to cool down a bit every so often. 2, to allow the ISP (cable modem) to update whatever firmware they need to during restart.

A few years ago, I saw on The Screen Savers TV show that in San Francisco they were putting together old PC's to use as wireless access points. The idea is to take an old PC and use a disk image on CD to run the AP. This takes the hard drive out of the equation. The CD loads the program into RAM and everything works. This program is much more esoteric than an average wireless router. They had a fairly good mesh going out there, from what I understand. The idea came to me week or so ago to take DynDNS updater and do somewhat of the same thing.

The idea I have is to take a USB drive and connect it to an Ethernet cable and then to the router. You all gave me part of this idea:
< http://damnsmalllinux.org/usb-qemu.html >

I am not sure if the USB drive would need to be powered or not, probably so.
So, I surf and find:
< http://www.softwareandstuff.com/h_net_ngea101.html >

< http://zxpro.com/catalog....78.html >

Perhaps a USB CD drive:
< http://www.addonics.com/products/external_cd/pocket_ii.asp >

It seems like this can be done. Granted the DynDNS program, or your, or something like this, would have to be edited for whatever hardware combination works. I am just looking for an option here for me and to share with everyone. Seems like this can be done for less than $100 with a CD drive, probably less than $25 with the USB drive. What do you think?

Thank You,
Stephen Dawson

Posted by humpty on Oct. 01 2006,02:58

eh? i'm not sure what you want, DSL requires a pc to run.

Posted by shdawson on Oct. 01 2006,13:07

Ah, so that make more sense now.

What are the chances of having an OS on a USB drive? Guess the CPU has to be there, huh?

Posted by chaostic on Oct. 01 2006,22:14

It can run off of a usb drive, granted the pc you use can boot off usb. If not, stick to cd.