HOW DID WE GET OUR APPLICATIONS INSTALLED ON A MESH
NETWORK.
GETTING STARTED WITH THE HARDWARE
We started with 2 new Linksys WRT54GL routers and loaded the HSMM-MESH 3.2 software per
their instructions on each.
We attached 1 Laptop computer running Windows XP Home and 1 Running Windows XP Media
Center software to one router only. We obtained several IP addresses and wrote them down.
First the IP address of the MESH routers in the format 10.xxx.xxx.xxx, and these came from the
routers using a browser and the address 172.27.0.1 which brought up the routers set-up page.
We easily found the routers new IP address from those set-up pages, Secondly the address of
each of the attached laptop machines issued by the routers LAN DHCP in the format
172.27.xxx.xxx was found by going into the DOS prompt and running IPCONFIG on each. You
can also find this by looking at the network connections page on each machine. We recorded
the names of the two computers from the Control Panel >System>Computer Name screen on
each.

Here are the applications we plan to run on our server
FTP Server
HTTP/web Server
E-Mail Server
3CX PBX Server

Here are the major applications running on our client machines
FTP client
Internet Explorer
Outlook Express
3CX Phone
Netmeeting


We turned off all firewalls on all the computers to simplify our tasks as has been recommended by others.

THE FTP SERVER
We decided to start our testing with the simplest piece of software we could find, and we
guessed that a simple FTP server would be the simplest.
We obtained an open software free copy of 3com’s, FTP software and set up an FTP
Damon/Server on one of the machines. We also set up FTP clients on the other machine. Now
recognize that these machines are on the same LAN and have different LAN addresses. Lets call
them 172.27.0.100 and 172.27.0.130. 172.27.0.130 is the machine that we loaded the
Damon/server software. We configured the 172.27.0.100 machine to use and connect to
172.27.0.130 and since they use port 20 AND 21 to send and receive messages, and since we
were outside the firewall on the router, we did not have to port forward anything to anywhere.
We told 127.27.0.100 to connect to 127.27.0.130. As soon as we told it to connect, it did and
we had an FTP link from 172.27.0.100 to 172.27.0.130 and could move files and folders in either
direction. We also moved some files into a shared folder on our Damon/server so that any
machine on the network could come and download it. Why we did this will become evident in
a minute when we go from one computer to a router, then to another router trying to get to
another machine that has what we want.
Now we took a third machine and attached it to the second router. We obtained the applicable
10.xxx.xxx.xxx and 172.27.xxx.xxx address as before for this router and client machine. We
installed our FTP Client software on this machine. We then went to our first router
(10.48.63.183) and Port forwarded port 20 and 21 (FTP uses these ports) to 172.27.0.130 (this is
the machine that was running our FTP Damon/server) . Now we told our client machine
attached to the second router to connect to 10.48.63.183 and off it went and connected to our
172.27.0.130 machine (remember we port forwarded ports 20 and 21 to this machine).
Effectively, our third machine got onto the MESH and told everyone that it wanted to send a
message to 10.48.63.183 and use ports 20 and 21 to send the message through. When the
message was delivered to 10.48.63.183 it sent it out on port 21 to 172.27.0.130 over ports 20
and 21 and 172.27.0.130 was listening on port 20 or 21 and received the message. Now
10.48.63.130 is known as the NCC-KC0TGY machine and 10.48.66.36 is known as SPARE-1-
KC0TGY. ( It absolutely makes no difference which comes first the name of the router or the
Ham call sign and I prefer this arrangement.) These names can be substituted for the IP
Addresses whenever you figure you know that it really is working and the DNS facility of the
routers translates the names to ip addresses and gets the messages to the appropriate places
just as fast and accurately. Now everyone knows, (originally I didn’t but it is true), you cannot
send a message to a machine that has not asked for something to be sent to it that is behind a
firewall. This is what firewalls do. They stop unsolicatated messages from coming into your
computer unless you asked someone to send you that information. Going out is OK….. So what
does this really mean? Remember I said we put a shared folder on the machine that has our
FTP Damon/server running on it? That was so one machine can place (upload) a file or folder
onto the FTP server machine, and another machine, far across the mesh can come along and
download it for its use. In fact, a lot of machines can come along and download that file. This is
the way we intend to keep our e-mail and telephone number listings up to date. We will put
the updated files and folders on the FTP machine in a shared folder and everyone will come
along and download it to their desktops, replacing whatever was there and thereby updating
their e-mail and telephone number files.

THE HTTP/WEB SERVER
The process of loading up the HTTP/WEB Server was done the same way. We installed IIS (a
Windows service available on Windows XP Media Center and Windows XP Professional) on our
Windows XP Media Center Machine, and configured it. This was on the 172.27.0.130 server
machine which was on the NCC-KC0TGY node. Everything was easy from here. Our browsers
on our client machines were configured to use 172.27.0.100:90/index.html for the machine on
the same LAN as the 172.27.0.130 server and 10.48.63.183:90/index.html (on the client
machine on the LAN on the 10.48.66.36 node) (port 90 was used because the HSMM-MESH™
nodes use port 80 for their HTTP Set-up web pages) as the home pages of the browsers and off
we went with web pages appearing from 172.27.0.130:90/index.html or
10.48.63.183:90/index.html.

THE E-MAIL SERVER
We used the Mailenable free e-mail software and loaded the e-mail server on our server
machine i.e. 172.27.0.130 on the 10.48.63.183 node. For the client machine on this LAN we set
the e-mail address to access the 172.27.0.130 machine as the server. We port forwarded port
25 to the 172.27.1.130 server machine. On the client machine we set the address to the
10.48.66.36 node and it sent the message out thru port 25 to our 172.27.0.130 server,

THE VOIP (TELEPHONE PBX) SERVER
We used the 3CX free VoIP software from 3CX and loaded the server on our server
172.27.0.130 on the 10.48.63.183 node. Now we know that this free software will only allow
four concurrent telephone calls and is only for demonstration purposes, but this is enough for
our demo project. For the client machine on this LAN we set the telephone number to access
the 172.27.0.130 as the server. We port forwarded port 5060 and 5090 to the 172.27.1.130
client machine on our 10.48.63.183 node, so that the client machine 172.27.0.55 on node
10.48.66.36 can find its way to the appropriate server. We aimed these none local routers to
10.48.66.36, and everything worked well.