THIS WEEK'S ACTIVITIES AT LITA

Basically,this was a week of practical work both for us as UNZA students and the local students.The objective of our project this week was to establish a unza network using the DD-WRT54G routers which are an upgraded version of the original WRT54G routers.The routers come with inbult software and a separate CD-ROM .The photo on the top left of this page shows two blue electronic boxes with antanaes,these are the boxes refered to as routers.One of these boxes was configured as an access .When using the inbult software to configure the router,the router was first connected to a computer using an ethernet CAT5 cable and then connected to the power supply.The routers setup page was accessed by opening a web page and typing the default IP Address of that particular router which can be changed for security reasons.Once the setup page was displayed Clicked on the wireless icon which displayed a page which allowed us to set the wireless mode to AP i.e access point meaning that this router would be the one transmitting signals all around.The wireless network mode was set to G-ONLY since all our cards and routers supported G.Then the wireless Network Name(SSID) was changed from linksys to UNZA implying that any laptop , router or indeed any other machine with a wireless card would recognise our network by this name.These setting were saved by clicking on the save button.Upon saving saving the settings we could automatically see the unza network on one of the laptops.

In addition, another task was to access the internet wiredly using ethernet cables.To do this exercise we first had to configure the router to posses both the WAN(wide area network) and LAN(local area network) address,in this case the router was assigned 10.1.1.90 and 192.168.2.1 .The router uses the WAN IP address to access the internet and the LAN IP address to connect to several other PCs ,in this exercise the router was connected to one PC.For this communication to be possible,however,the PC had to be assigned an IPaddress,subnet address and the gateway address.On the LAN side of the AP(ROUTER) the gateway address was the IPaddress of the router itself because it was performing the role of the gateway at the same time while on the WAN side, the the gateway address was 10.1.1.1. The DNS IP address was that of the gateway throughout.The DNS (domain name server) is the server that translates the domain names into IP addresses and the DHCP(dynamic host control panel) is the server which tells the computer what its IP address,subnet and gateway is.Upon serving these setting internet was accessed on the host PC.