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Posted 2008/06/17

Setting up at the dig

Today was the IT setup day for the 2008 dig. At the moment we have no local WiFi or WAN Wifi link, we do have LAN to all but 1 PC and we have the IT generator going. We have had a number of technical issues with the new WiFi kit ITS is using that weren't discovered during the ITS testing period. We will have ITS back on site tomorrow to continue to work the problems. Emma and I sent the day sorting mainly IT infrastructure related things out. Here are a few photos of how it is going.

The porta cabins this year are vandal proof. This means that we are cabling up through vents in the floor because the doors and windows all lock very tight at night.

This is the VERA cabin, the IT kit will sit in the rear corner. We have a switch, UPS, and PoE gear for the network and a bunch of video related bits to provide the on site webcams.

Barn
We used the viewing platform to get access to the side of the barn. The barn houses our ADSL connection and a bunch of related gear. We had a new antenna put up on the other side of the window that can do 802.11a which we hope will give us a better back haul WAN link to the site (which is up the road).

We have a dedicated IT equipment generator to hopefully get over the power spiking problems of last year. We are tightly controlling what gets plugged into this so we don't overload it. We now have three generators on site and they are wired into the cabin’s internal structured power, this is an improvement on taping power cables through windows! The IT generator also has a tank big enough to run for a full working day so we wont get the random power cuts from last year.

Structured cabling
To provide a reliable LAN we are using Ethernet between the cabins rather than trying to just use the site WiFi. Emma and I have made ducting from re-purposed scaffolding polls which we hope will protect the cables. Today we linked VERA to two rooms in HQ and VERA to the antenna mast.

Our friendly neighbourhood scaffolders took time out from setting the site on fire with their saw and put up a dirty great pole on the side of HQ for our WAN and local WiFi antennas. This year the AP will also live up the pole, powered over Ethernet and in a weather proof box.