Comment by myself248

I have a bunch (still not nearly as many as I'd like) and never got starmode working, and they finally dropped it from recent kernels so it'd be a whoooole lot of learning to try again.

But simple point-to-point dialup (using my XP box as a RAS/DUN server) served me well back in the day, even after the network went down, because I put my home node as high up as I could, and it would get me roughly a half-mile radius around the house. Loooong before 802.11ah! It was fast enough for VNC.