Wasteland Image from www.man-lounge.com

Chip is very focused on making sure we have food and shelter when the world ends. Because I simply cannot stand really focusing on a struggle to survive, I focus on the struggle to rebuild. One element I think is absolutely essential to rebuilding after a huge catastrophe is the internet. In order to draw this scenario, I have to set just a few parameters. The assumptions are:

• There was no major electro magnetic pulse (or your electronic devices were in a Faraday Box)
• Electricity is gone
• The old school, non-VOIP phone lines are still in existence and they work.  I think this is quite a bit more likely than VoIP phones working… especially assuming a centralized DNS server is down.

My stress on the internet is not because of porn, however lovely it may be.  I feel a rogue “internet” will be the only efficient method of communications, once the main DNS servers and most web servers are out, cell phones are gone, electricity is kabashed, and the mailman isn’t coming around.

I live in the Southeastern United States (North Carolina).  AT&T, formerly Bell South, runs the analog phone line roost down here.  VoIP lines require too much intervention with a centralized operator and hardware, this just has be done analog style, in my opinion.  There may be a better way, I am no telecommunications expert.

So we find a few UPSs (uninterpretable power supplies).  Logically, you can go to medium and large businesses for these… however, if our power is out, the reserve is probably used up.  The next place I would check might be Tiger Direct or Frys.  These stores have probably been ramsacked by losers, however, a UPS is heavy as hell and the purpose isn’t super clear to the type of person that thinks about looting electronics instead of saving their own ass.

It won’t come fully charged.  Typically, half-mast is the best you can hope for.  However, you won’t be draining a lot of juice, so you can spread it out over a few days.

Grab as many as you can and set them up like a daisy chain, with the most power one being the closest to our computer.  Laptop or desktop… it doesn’t matter so long as it has a modem port and you can turn off the monitor to save battery.  A laptop is preferable… maybe it’s got some juice of its own!

Then, start a BBS.  Oh, you know what a BBS is, don’t you?  It’s what that creepy uncle of yours spent all him time staring at in the late 80s.  A bulletin board system is pretty cool… but very localized.  For those of you that think Google IS the internet, it may be a hard concept to grasp.  You setup the host computer (yours) with some BBS software (check out www.synchro.net it’s free).  Get your old fashioned analog phone number and past it everywhere.  Telephone poles, trees, it doesn’t matter.  People telnet into your computer via that phone number and can exchange files and information.  They will need a telnet client to connect (which are available for all platforms).  Probably want to get that before doomsday if you don’t have one already.

It would behoove you to have such a rig setup before doomsday, because, well, you won’t be able to download the software after the fact and you don’t want to waste precious battery life installing and getting setup.  Turn off all the crap on your PC… we won’t the processor doing the MINIMAL amount of work so we can extend that battery power.  Once you’re out of power, you’re out of BBS.  The monitor drains a LOT, so keep your usage on that to a bare minimum.

You do not under any circumstance want to assign a host name to your telnet server, as without DNS it won’t resolve.  Need that phone number!