Last year my friends and I created a sort of ‘pirate’ network on campus. It wasn’t a ‘pirate’ network in the sense that we used it for file-sharing and that other stuff, but that it was illegal for students to create their own networks on campus. We created it for Halo.

Since none of the buildings had working ethernet ports but instead forced us to cramp together on wireless B, we had to change that.

We started out small, connecting a few close rooms together so we could play Halo. Then, I purchased 1000FT of ethernet cable, and that’s when the little saturday afternoon idea of “lets make a network!” blew into something much, much bigger.

Eventually, my friend and I decided that we wanted to connect our two dorms together. Thankfully, our windows lined up and we had line-of-sight with each other’s rooms. But how would we do this? There was several hundred feet of airspace between our rooms. The only possible way to do it was wirelessly. I researched a bit, and with the help of a few people very knowledgeable on the subject, I decided that we needed the ability for us to have WDS on the routers we bought. So, we bought 2 WRT54GL’s.

After that, we not only had about 8 rooms connected on our floor, but also about 3 or 4 additional rooms connected on the other end at the other dorm. Eventually, almost half of the rooms on our floor were hooked up to our network.

My friend’s WRT54GL acted as the “main” router, dealing out IP addresses for anyone connected. My roommate used his own WRT54G as both a client and wifi grabber. I used my WRT54GL as the link between the other dorm and our’s. We even connected people downstairs for a while until some jerk cut the cable in the stairwell. I often joked about how I could shut everything down by pulling out a single cable (I guess the power gets to you after a while).

We used the network at first for Halo, but then my friend got a NAS drive and we all put on our favorite shows, etc onto it so we could stream media from anywhere, as long as we were connected to the network. We used Xboxs with XBMC on them to stream media to our TVs in our rooms, it was awesome.

We never got ‘caught’ for having our network, although I am pretty sure the school knew about it. I know I was kind of vague and subtle on the details of the network, but if you have any thoughts, feel free to chime in below!