Blog

2011
- 12
- 11
- 10
- 09
- 08
- 07
- 06
- 05
- 04
- 03
- 02
- 01

2010
- 12
- 11
- 10
- 09
- 08
- 07
- 06
- 05
- 04
- 03
- 02
- 01

2008
- 12
- 11
- 10
- 09
- 08
- 07
- 06
- 05
- 04
- 03
- 02
- 01

2007
- 12
- 11
- 10
- 09
- 08
- 07
- 06
- 05
- 04
- 03
- 02
- 01

2006
- 12
- 11
- 10
- 09
- 08
- 07
- 06
- 05
- 04
- 03
- 02
- 01

2005
- 12
- 11
- 10
- 09
- 08
- 07
- 06
- 05
- 04
- 03
- 02
- 01

Posted 2008/04/23

Infrastructure for the 2008 dig

Andy Gatward has been keeping me up to date with the plan for LAN and WAN on the dig this year. We had a meeting a few months ago with IT Services where we laid out what we wanted. This post has some of the info I have received from Andy as the plan has been fleshed out.

The big news is Amanda redesigned the trench layout so that HQ, VERA and the classroom are on the right as you come in the entrance, beyond the Roman garden (this means Sandie and Finds got moved). This means all the IT stuff and computers can be in the same area and near the 2 generators.
There will be an AP on a pole on the south-east corner of the trench on the viewing platform - a cable will lead from this to our IT kabins - some of this cable can be buried under the spoilheap.
There will be a new firewall using ADSL2+ and we have had the card delivered for this. The firewall lives in the barn and moving to ADSL2 will hopefully give us more bandwidth and maybe a more stable connection.
The plan is to have a single Ethernet cable between the equipment mounted on the pole and the IT portakabin - hopefully we can run PoE along this, but we need to check the power requirements don't exceed the nominal 15.4W power budget per port.
The AP on the pole will be the only WiFi network for users on the site. The kabins will all have wired Ethernet. Due to upgrades in Uni data centres, there are loads of cables with lengths of 5m, 8m, 10m, 15m, 20m and 25m available.
The pole AP will be configured in standalone bridge mode. The link to the barn will probably be on the 802.11a ‘B’ or ‘C’ band so it uses 5GHz+ and frees up some frequency space in case we use GPS / triangulation equipment that uses 2,4Ghz. The AP will also bridge traffic on to the Ethernet port, which will be connected to a 24-port switch.
The cable in the ground that goes out to the AP on the pole will be protected with either garden hose or the uPVC downpipe that is used for washing machines. We will need to re-terminate the ‘outdoor’ end of the cable using an IP67-rated connector to make it immune to water ingress.