LAS Visits a Wireless ISP Powered by Linux

every year Jupiter broadcasting has been to Southeast Linux Fest we've had a great time a large part of that is due to the stellar internet connection provided by global vision this is in part due to one of their senior technicians Zack Underwood Zack has not only been paramount in providing solid reliable internet for the conference but has been extraordinarily accommodating in providing us with the demands of mobile broadcasting so that we can bring you uninterrupted video streaming coverage of self each year after self wrapped last year Zack extended us an invitation to come on down to Greenville South Carolina to visit global visions headquarters where it turns out in addition to providing internet to Linux conferences they run a wireless ISP that serves customers all around the area Zack and I share a fanboy ISM for ubiquity equipment and he takes us on a tour to show us how they use ubiquity equipment to run their company so this is this building actually used to be a auction house for auto for vehicles so this this is a was a garage bay where they did inspections on the vehicles themselves we've got we kept the garage bay door which makes free so we can accept pallets of equipment but this is our primary storage location for all of our wireless equipment we get you know a couple thousand dollars worth of ubiquity inventory at this point even some new stuff sitting on the desk right there is one of their new AC access points that they just released less than a month ago it is it's a dual band wireless AC and it's it's MSRP is awesome hundred bucks Wow all right so this this this is also another garage Bay we use this again for storage this is more the construction stuff sometimes we have to fabricate mounts for the wireless equipment we also got a huge stack of servers that we're trying we're going to be getting rid of these are all old we also keep all of our tower climbing stuff and here including all the harnesses all the ropes and even some of the wireless antennas you want to do so this is this is what we use for backhaul this is a 30 DB dish on this so this is a two-foot dish this is five gigahertz and the particular radio that we have is is actually a newer radio this is the air fiber five X it is five gigahertz it's connectorized so we can connect it to our own antennas and the speed is it is half duplex but it has a duty cycle so you can do like a seventy-five percent duty cycle so that means 75% of the air time will be devoted to one way of the traffic so we are we have a lot of download traffic so we can basically focus that in a direction so that to optimize our download speeds this thing I we haven't we haven't installed a speed checked it yet but theoretically should be more than 200 medics so this is what we use for doing Thai and access so these are sectors in this particular insulation is actually going to go up on a water tank on the very top of the water tank we're going to mount a pipe and this whole assembly of four antennas were like four antennas and radios well actually get dropped right on the pipe and and this will through four antennas each other 120 degrees will give us 360 degrees coverage I know that's I know that's a low overlap but we do that because when you're on the side of an antenna you can I your signal strength would be lower so we do do a little bit of overlap to maintain a good coverage so for being for being a 9:9 employee office we have a surprisingly large amount of networking here first we bring in the internet wireless which comes in of one of these cables and then brings into a 48 ports which which is almost filled the top three cups which is actually our POS which that we power all the phones and when we SPECT the cabling for this office we ran two cable drops to every desk one for phone one for the computer and the phone we do p OE then it all comes back into here where we have the cabling the network operations center are the NOC as it's commonly referred to is the central location below the towers where all the networking equipment and servers are stored because they have extra space global vision actually rents some of the server space out to other clients that have needs to house servers inside of racks or actually rent the servers themselves so what don't I do since gold which is a small company we no one has just one job duty I do that network administration I do serve administration I do tower work I do cabling I do site surveys basically do anything that's needed yeah so this is what we call data center anyone who actually worked in the data center my laughs but this is not bad for for our size company we got several racks around here that are not in use because we have downsized through virtualization but here's our main Teleco rack we have fiber coming in from other providers so these are two other providers that are in the building with us we have fiber that comes from the roof we have our POS rich and here we got different provider equipment this is a TMT a TMT even some t1 equipment all right and so here we just have some customer equipment and one thing we started getting better at doing is all of our UPS's are now managed through SNMP so they run a test every for every two weeks and a self-test and if that could test the batteries to carry load and if anything's wrong it sends us an email that says hey you need to check your batteries and so we'll come up here we replace the batteries this blue cabinet is a one of the satellite providers so what happens is when you watch your local station so your ABC or NBC your CBS your Fox local stations they actually record it over the air off of antennas and then the cabinet then encodes that into a into an IP stream that's then sent via fiber to over where´s and transmit it up to the satellite so that it can come back down to your satellite dish we just have various more customer equipment this one's actually knit these next two cabinets are actually our cabinets right here we have our observing box this is A's sent us box running observe yon which is a semi open-source project they do the open core freemium type model and we have about three to four hundred devices that it pulls every five minutes and right now it can pull every device network-wide in about two minutes and so but if that ever goes above five minutes we can start having data loss so we have to make sure we iLike it to be under four minutes so there's about three to four hundred it's it's been a few days since I've checked and so also in this cabinet we have our the software that we used to back up our vmware cluster v Ranger we also got a couple storage boxes and then we have a very large UPS down there that is a fifth better than five thousand VA or volt amp which then powers all of the equipment and our neck strap this is our this is the core of the network here we have a couple routers we also have the back of our course which which we stack so these are stacking cables that make it two physical switches one logical switch and each stacking cable this two stacking cables each cable this capable of 10 gigabits so this there's 20 gigabits between switches for data sharing he'll be to only two of these are actually powered up and active and they are they are routers they're debian-based routers that of we use an OS called Beata and so it winds Debian at its core and then these these newer HP servers are our VMware staff so we run three VMware 5.5 servers and then we have a sand down here in almost three years we've had zero downtime oh yeah we only have about three windows VMs and about 30 Linux VMs and the vast majority of them are some type of RPM based so either rail or CentOS so here here is the back of here's the back the back of the rack so here's the switches here's some fiber coming in from different floors so we have another floor with a switch that we connect via fiber then here's the back of the routers one thing that we do that I think it's kind of unique in the industry is we actually run we don't run an AV system we run a wall power and a battery power so we have two labels here we have a wall power label down here and a battery-powered the wall literally just plugs straight into electrical outlet under the floor the battery gets plugged into the UPS and since most servers have two power supplies we put one power supply on the UPS one on the wall power and so if we need to do maintenance for the UPS like take it completely offline like well haven't physically swapped the unit not everything has to get powered off because the stuff will continue to be powered on the second power supply off of the wall power and then down here here is our fiber channel switch we run a 8 gig fiber channel switch it runs - so each cable is running at 8 gigabits and to each server we run two of those for redundancy so we have a total of 16 gigabits one thing also we also run managed PDUs so this is actually connected power distribution unit so we can remotely reboot a power port we can also get monitoring of power usage per port so it's a great way to track and keep track of everything and I'm also if we need to remote reboots those of you that may not be familiar with the wireless ISP or wisp they are an Internet service provider that uses a wireless infrastructure to provide Internet to their customers a large internet pipe is brought in to a central location word is then sent wirelessly to their respective towers and ultimately out to client locations ubiquity equipment here is powered by busybox the distro of linux specifically geared towards appliance based use before we can go up on a tower and take a look at the physical equipment not to mention the views I spend a few minutes getting safety briefed all right so in tower climbing certain strengths are very important this is actually a sling so looks like a shoelace it kind of does the thickness it does kind of look like a shoelace but you can use this for rigging so we use it for rigging because our equipment is kind of light but you can also use it for like an anchor so you can wrap it around something and now it's an anchor that price supports like 2030 pounds yeah yeah 2030 pounds no this is actually rated in this configuration for 5,000 pounds 5,000 pounds yeah the shoelace will support 5,000 pounds yes so I could pull a pickup truck with another pickup truck hitch the hitch with this Wow yes the next is and counter climbing we use a lot of carabiners for connecting different stuff here is the older motto here's an older model that we have it's an all steel model here is an aluminum model jeez that's crazy yeah there's a little bit of wing diff and these are rated for the exact same the exact same about a force that can hold the same yeah they're both rated for 5000 pounds and and this orientation so this load weight straight down is 5,000 pounds and this orientation against the gate is only 3,600 pounds and with it open like this it's like 2,000 pounds Wow and all parotia regulations all the carabiners that were used for for life-saving equipment must be double action so it takes two actions to open it in this case twist and then you can open it okay and also for and the other requirements they have to be self locking so when you let go it automatically locks in my and recreational work like mountain climbing and rock climbing that you do recreationally it is formidable to have a self closing but non-locking one in a professional environment is not allowed okay all of the safety equipment that we use is has a minimum of five thousand pound rating here's one of the anchors that we use what we'll do is if we need to anchor like a rope or something we'll put it around part of the tower and and this orientation and now we can tighten it and hook our rope right here and this will this again is rated for 5000 pounds now I don't know about you guys down here in South Carolina but I had only five thousand pounds and I don't know anyone that does why is it that we why is it that you guys have equipment that's rated for 5000 pounds so it's not just your body weight part of it is is because the safety equipment that we use has a fall distance okay this is actually a six foot lanyard okay and so when when this is anchored say it is on your harness so you'd be on your harness right between your shoulder blades and it is anchored to the tower at your feet roughly your feet so if you fall you're you now going to fall let's say from the distance between your back and your feet let's say five feet then this is a six foot apparatus so you're going to follow another six feet before the safety equipment even kicks in then you're going to follow another three feet before this safety equipment will bring you to a stop so your feet can now be you know 15 20 feet below your anchor point and when when that anchor point gets stressed from you falling it can a it can observe it can do an impact a very high impact load and so the the five thousand mark is basically is really it only gives about a thousand pound impact on the anchor but that five thousand is a buffers on a safety center factor and the ropes that we have right here this is a half inch double braid rope and it's rated for a 10,000 pound break strength so you told me earlier that a knot will actually negatively effect the ropes ability to hold a certain amount of strength yep so a when a rope is rated for a particular strength it's rated in a straight line but when you add knots it will basically degrade the strength of the Rope by a certain percent based on the type of knot so that's why it was nice about using these ropes is because they got a five dollar or ten thousand pound rating even when we put a knot we could still stay at or above that 5000 mark now does that persistently degrade the Roper is that just for the duration of the nut so just the duration of the nut so so in this particular scenario I don't know the exact percentages but this particular knot will degrade the strength of this entire assembly by a certain percent of the total strength okay and per OSHA regulations the anchors that we use for 4ry lanyard right here for fall protection the actual specification says if you believe it can hold a pickup truck 5,000 pounds then it is safe - it is safe to use as an anchor during my training he kept stressing he kept asking me look at that look at that particular spot could you hang an f-150 off of that particular spot if you don't feel comfortable hanging a pickup truck off of that spot then that's then you shouldn't feel comfortable putting your life and anchoring to that location and doing climbing in a professional environment we have to use full body harnesses so that it's over this over the shoulder straps with leg straps this is required and recreational climbing it is okay get away with just the waste but and professional timing you have to use a full body harness if you're gonna be spending a lot of time hanging in a harness this metal seat is a godsend because basically what it does is when you go to position or basically stop out of location you'll hook into these d-rings and that hooks to the seat so when you've got to lean back you actually put your weight on your butt and not your back or your shoulders or even your feet so it basically helps transfer your weight to a more of a sitting position okay and also every time when you're on a tower hard hat is required the at one point the depth the Deaf's and tower industry were getting really bad so the OSHA or OSHA's director basically said told his field agents that if you saw anyone doing work on a tower pull over on the side of the road get there get there DSLR with the long lens on it and take pictures of everything they could and basically they'll go then those agents would go back to the field office give it over to a specialist and the specialist will then groom the pictures for violations and will basically mail violations to the to a company of various things and a hardhat could be a $7,000 violation Wow so simply not having the hard hat on could be a huge violation also in towers we said sometimes our towers are not the best maintained on the ground as far as bugs and grass and such so we always keep a nice bottle of Hornet and wasps spray because we have rolled up on sites and at maybe on the between two pieces of equipment two boxes there'll be a Yellow Jackets nest and the only way to safely climb that tower at that point is to take care of the Yellowjackets that's why we keep a can of this juice them yeah absolutely another concept that is very important is particularly if you work if you do any work with with broadcast equipment this is called lockout tagout so basically what happens is is anyone who's on the tower we're basically giving a lock and key that they would put a wet this device but then go around the power supply for that tower so like like a for a radio station this device would go around the breaker that services power to the transmitter because when if the transmitters a gets turned on while you're on the tower you can basically be microwaved on the tower so this basically prevents someone else from coming along going this breaker shouldn't be off and turning the breaker back on and so by having the tower climber have one of the keys to the lock because this this particular unit will hold six locks so every person on the tower will get their own lock including someone on the ground so if the person on the tower is still in the tower that lock is still there so there's as a rule you do not cut locks unlock out tag out so the only way for that equipment to get turned back on is that the person comes down off the tower and back to safety and then will unlock the device for you how about those three foot yeah so these are our three foot shock lanyards we use these when we're on a rope grab so I woke grab basically a safety mechanism that would put on the Rope itself that will act as the backup safety mechanism so these are is a three foot shock pack so this and it's normal configuration is three feet but when it when it gets deployed in a fall situation I believe it's five feet is what these will grow to and you can see all the all the elastic parts are contained in this bag so this just rips off this yeah it's totally will rip and then this expands out yep yep and and this is this is a one-time use application so if this is ever deployed you trash it throw it away it cannot be trusted again okay so this is our equipment it changes based on what the current technology is what's been released what our current needs are so right now we have our main switch it's a layer 3 switch we do all of our we do all the routing on right here's a switch we do all the routing of our right and traffic or management traffic on the layer 3 switch then we have two routers that OSPF for the client traffic where all the public traffic here we have the power injectors that we use we also have this also provides wireless for like cell phones and laptops when we're up here working and then of course we also have these phones yeah this so this is actually the hardware is a ubiquity pico that has been flashed to unify firmware so it's actually a unify access point at this point and then of course we also have a phone that's hooked up to a little ATM that gives us phone service up here yeah so it's an extension off of the office our office network we got the power injectors and also a UPS that is managed so this tower right here this cell this self-supporting one with the omni's near the top that is actually owned and/or that is operated by a paging company that they do 900 megahertz based pagers that you use for particularly hospitals still use them a lot this red and white tower right here there was one antenna at the very top and that is actually a TV antenna for a religious station that they receive the signal via the satellite dish over there and then retransmitted over-the-air to their clients and then this tower right here is our tower that we're on we got about a dozen antennas up there that first set of arms is a hundred feet so that gives you about the scale that it's at the top of the tower I think is a hundred and fifty feet maybe 200 but we don't have any equipment up at the top around here is a very large so a very large self-supporting 500 foot tower that has I think four or five different FM radio stations are located on that tower I mean you can touch the base of the tower itself just yeah don't go up there and touch the top of the antennas if I remember right the primary antenna up there is is five hundred thousand watts and and then you see the you see the three TV antennas that are a little over the ridge one of those is a 1 million watt transmitter million watts yeah million watts ERP it is actually a religious TV station and then AT&T has some backhaul point-to-point microwaves which is this there's a tower over here that looks a lot like ours that has a lot of different clients including another paging company and even the the post office has some equipment up there that now they're starting to get more like UPS with the handheld check scanner devices and so they they have a they got a set of frequencies that they transmit off of this building or off of that tower there I do not know the frequency okay all right so obviously as being an interim and Wireless ISP we when we bought this building we chose this specific location because it could see one of our towers so right up there we have our office connection so that allows us to get on the office allows us to speak to our data center the rest of the core the network and give this Internet with that particular antenna we run our connection uncapped so we're getting about 40 40 down 40 up I wish actually right here so one thing what we also do is we do some stuff that's a little out of the box as you can see on the roof line we have a second little white antenna and it actually connects to a warehouse across the street and what we do is we actually do a managed camera system so the cameras are actually over there but they get recorded in the office and we did that over a private wireless link and when all the cameras are running it's about 20 Meg's saturated and of course being a wireless company we have to deal with towers a lot and so one thing we're trying to get into to help keep costs lower is actually building their own towers and so you can see we have one tower that's kind of in the weeds at this point that is actually a 60-foot Tower it's a Rome or Ron is a manufacturer and between the three sections it weighs about 900 pounds climbing the tower was actually a blast we put in to practice a bunch of safety precautions to make sure nothing bad would happen after I got myself tied off and we got the equipment suspended 300 feet up in the air we actually conducted an interview and Zak explains exactly what happens on this tower and all the other towers that this tower communicates to to provide wireless internet to their customers by far one of the most interesting interviews I've ever done oh yeah Zak somehow has gotten me up here what are we 300 some feet up I about 350 feet we're on we're on Tower that provides Internet to this whole city and they provide it wirelessly Zak how often are you up here I'm about once a month installing or changing equipment do you ever get that you don't have a fear of heights then absolutely not I love this view now is this this is kind of your main tower yeah this is our main data center is underneath this tower it's on the top floor of this building and this tower is actually built about 40 feet above the roof of this 330 foot building so we're actually quite a bit high and and unfortunately cameras mounted on the other side of the tower I would show you the ground yeah yeah it it's taken quite a bit of work to get all this kind of setup yes yes and the weather is so great as you can see all this rain and wind now this actually wirelessly links to other towers in the areas that the way it works yes that is correct we have from this from this building in this tower alone we have a link that goes 44 miles up to North Carolina that's our farther this link by far but our shortest one is actually to our tower over here it's about four miles and you you guys maintain all of that stuff yes um so I i I do the primary tower work and also most of the networking and then below where we are now this is where your main data center is huh yes and the top floor of this building right under this tower is our main data center where we get our internet from and also house all of our servers now what primarily is the equipment on this tower that we're looking at so the primary vendor that we use for all of our wireless equipment is a company called ubiquity we use a lot of their different products and but we also on this particular tower we also have Assaf technical Inc it's a license link 11 gigahertz just six our particular link is six miles again two 336 Meg's Wow that's absolutely incredible and all that's being powered from from all this equipment these are all antennas I see yes everything the white things below us are antennas and we'll show you some still shots of those later but we have I think about 11 or 12 different antennas on this roof not all of them are on this tower but a lot of them are and then the radios are attached behind them yes and all of our products that we use we run either Ethernet or fiber up to the radio and then the radio is mounted directly to the antenna outstanding anything else you wanna anything else you want to tell me before you get me down from here no no it's just gonna take a few minutes get everything wrapped up all right sounds good well thanks a lot for for doing an interview at 300 plus feet you're welcome all hanging on the spell anyway like I said we'll get you some still shots for that yeah don't kill me on the way down absolutely not - - too much paperwork kicks up get think sec

Channel: Jupiter Broadcasting

Views: 24,083

Keywords: Linux action show, linux, debian, centos, wireless, wifi, GNU/Linux (Operating System), wisp, Wireless Internet Service Provider (Organization), Internet Service Provider (Industry)

Id: nRV-_3hsJC8

Length: 32min 9sec (1929 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 06 2015