The Big Rebuild!!!!! |
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| Written by Administrator | |||
The process of the standardisation of BxWifi
The plan was to STANDARDISE!!! And DOCUMENT!!! I felt, along with a few others that the adhoc way the network had grown was starting to become a bit unmanageable. It would be much better with a SOE (Standard Operating Environment) for all of the routing boxes / hostap boxes. So after a few purchases of the wonderful CM9 minipci cards, pci cradles for them, and some tails we had a standard wifi card to use. This meant 1 driver was required… Immediately that was about 8 times simpler than the previous configuration. Then with all the PCs I had accumulated recently, plus the ones we pulled out, we got to work on a standard OS. Slackware 10.2 was chosen along with the madwifi driver for the CM9. The process of the standardisation of BxWifi Thursday morning… A few of us met at the hall (Thanks to Holy Trinity at Kelso for the use of the hall), with all the hardware we could find. Aceman, XtremeX, Flak, Mat and myself spread it all out and started the burn-in testing of the boxes (didn’t want them to fail when installed). By Thursday afternoon we had 2 boxes up and running, talking wirelessly, and everything was looking good… Until we tried adhoc mode (something we wanted for our backbones)… First hurdle… Then another with trying to switch modes between 802.11b, g or a. This was no good!!! We all left for a night to sleep on it. Friday, well I spend the day building up the boxes ready for the wifi driver to be installed. Surely with all the development with the madwifi driver there would be a fix soon enough. Mat (who will be hosting AP08) came and helped again. We got most of the boxes up to the point we wanted – so was a productive day XtremeX did some testing of drivers that night so that we could go full steam ahead on the Saturday. On the Saturday, because of other commitments we couldn’t start till the afternoon. XtremeX and I got on with the testing of various setups with the now working drivers . Both Flak and Mat popped in to help for a while, which was greatly appreciated. Things went fairly smoothly and most of the boxes were built and ready to be put in place. We finished quite late that night – we were able to keep on going thanks to Flak’s esky o’goodies . Sunday saw the installation of AP02, AP02a, AP04 and links to AP05, AP06. Things looked pretty good straight off. It would be later that day we realised there might actually be some issues with the drivers – stopping after a while (about 6 or so hours). The fortnight since has seen lots of late nights, playing with various drivers, and additional services, plus the installation of AP01 and AP03 plus a link to AP07 (the box is almost done for there – DAMN hardware failures!!!). IRC is running on all the boxes now – with compression between links to reduce traffic, DHCP, DNS, QoS is all in place. The network is looking fairly healthy. So with just a few more tasks to perform A BIG thanks to everyone involved – and lets hope with this enthusiasm we will see our network grow heaps in ‘06 Some photos will follow :) |
On the Australia Day "long weekend" (I took a flex on Friday to make it
a 4 day weekend) we ripped down the entire BxWifi network.
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