Fighting the WiFi
We spent today doing various things to try and make the site WiFi stable. We think we nearly have it cracked.
The WiFi has been up and down like a yo-yo since the kit was installed. When I arrived on site this morning it had been totally busted since Saturday morning. Fro the AP names we guessed that the kit had someone been reset to the factory defaults. With the help of Bob and Chris from Uni IT we got the settings put back, added a better short-range aerial to cover the site and spent several hours trying different combinations out.
At this stage we think there are two major problems with the setup:
- 1. The connectors for the aerials are very crap, they have very little keeping them in the holes. This means that they tend to randomly fall out, which is very bad for business. The current solution is to use tape to hold them, a classic engineering solution.
- 2. The AP is losing its settings. This is a total pain in the arse because you have to reprogram the device with a laptop when ever it does it. We do have a theory that it is happening because of dodgy power being supplied from the petrol generator. We are currently using an old UPS to smooth the power to the AP, this seems to be doing the trick but we are not 100% sure this is the fix.
We used various kit to test the signal strength including a MacBook, PDA, Nokia N800 and a tablet PC. Chris has some swanky software for doing WiFi site surveys, we did a bit of that today but we will wait unti the WiFi is working properly before doing the whole site so we aren't wasting our time. When we weren't bashing our heads on the AP Emma and I installed Ubuntu on the old PCs so we can do something useful with them.
Using the Mac to test the signal, shiny shiny.
Bob playing with the AP.
Chris doing the site survey.