Localnet attempt

At some point in the next few weeks, I'm going to take one of my ASUS WL-330gEs and set it up as an AP without an Internet Connection. I'll use WPA2 encryption to keep the wireless communications encrypted (even client-client communications pass through the AP first, and are protected by a pairwise cypher), make the key evident in the SSID, and have all DNS requests resolve to a box I'll be running a web server on with a greeting page, an explanation, and phpBB.

I'm curious to see what happens; There are a couple tech-savvy neighbors around here, including one I suspect is running a honeypot. I'm wondering if I might be able to spawn a by-wireless neighborhood BBS.

I broached the idea of a localnet to grlug once before, but I emphasized its potential as a wireless mesh cloud with gated for-pay access to the open Internet. There are a number of problems with using a mesh for any latency-sensitive activities, so many folks would be disappointed when they find that not all Internet connections are created equal.

So I'm going to drop the Internet from the equation, and focus on community-centric services like a bulletin board and, maybe, a local email and XMPP server.

Let's see if they notice...