Thursday, October 24, 2013

A few mesh things..



1- Reprogrammed two M2 bullets running the earlier NW-MESH load with the latest CHANGEME firmware.  Tried one as an upgrade instead of an install but wasn't sure about settings so went ahead and installed the whole thing.  Ubiquity installs are getting faster and easier every time.

2- A lighttpd web server is running on the Pi.  For now it's just serving some files off the attached old 500 G drive.  Good learn here is it's possible to directly HNA advertise the /pub directory and a PHP (web page script) file.  Thus either resource is available anywhere on the mesh as a simple web page click.

3 - PI vs POGO.   I'm currently running a PI as a 'computer/build server' and a POGO planned as a dedicated NW-MESH resource server. For future projects I'll be going more PI and less POGO.   While the POGO is faster and cheaper; it has less memory, no audio/video output and the full disk system is on a removeable memory chip which is easy to replace.   The biggest differentiation for me is that the PI uses (essentially) Debian and POGO is running ARCH-Linux which suffers big time from the newer is better syndrome.  PI just works - POGO got broke on an update that required searching out some "just this time" special commands that 'might work' because all of the /bin files were moved to /usr/bin.

4 - I'm working towards moving the local-local traffic off the mesh on to local Access Points as that's faster.   HD video won't go on the mesh and stutters.  :(

5 - 5 GHz is looking better all the time.   The three channels on 2.4 GHz aren't enough.  Any future AP's will be at lease Dual Band and I'm looking forward to trying out NW-MESH on 5 GHz.

6 - Waiting for the new Agent 440 Data Radio - we'll soon be Babbling on UHF.

7 - (added)  I now have an FTP server, proftpd,  running on the Pogo.  With a little more customization I should be able to point the IP camera at it instead of the FTP server that's been running for months and months on the little white ASUS netbook.  That will free up the netbook so it'll no longer be a mesh server but rather a client user device.

More soon.

73
Bill, WA7NWP