follow up

Alright kiddies - i've had a few weeks with the setup and there've been a few snags, luckily though they are easy enough to work around.

So what's the snag? Basically I found I was having major connectivity issues on my airport express in my living room. Examining the logs and all that it appeared to be related to signal strength - it was sitting around 20%. Sure, it worked but only sometimes, it was really frustrating. So why does this happen? I'll explain.

Although 5ghz N wifi networks have a few advantages (speed, less interference) - they also have a sore disadvantage - range. Now, sure, 5ghz doesn't travel as far but it physical objects affect it WAY more than they affect the 2.4ghz band. In an open room you can expect about 50ft range. You throw in a wall and some objects and that number reduces significantly.

Now my setup my airport extreme base station is in my office, then there's a kitchen and all sorts of crap in it followed by another wall. Clearly this was my problem. The solution? A repeater. And I'm lazy so I just bought another airport express and plopped in the kitchen. The result was about a 15-20% increase in signal to the aiport express in my livingroom (granted this is perceived signal). Since I've made this change nothing but stability. In fact it improved my peformance as well - the system is much punchier now (music/movies start quicker, lots of motion doesn't not induce stuttering).

It gets more interesting, and there are still things to try. Apple wifi products support two different "repeater" type mechanisms. One is apple proprietary - that's the one I'm using. The alternative is called "WDS" or "Wireless Distribution System". I haven't tried it out yet, but I've heard there are performance differences between that and the apple proprietary one. However, lucky for me, I've got enough performance and no connectivity problems - I won't be messing with it, but if someone does it'd be interesting to compare performance of the two mechanisms in a controlled environment. Btw - I've heard that airport expresses don't work well at repeaters - i've had no problems yet (3 weeks of use so far).

As for the network - that's that. I'm going to get into another project soon installing dd-wrt on a 20 dollar airlink router. The goal is to turn it into a fully functional and awesome access point for my b/g devices. Right now its running the original firmware which SUCKS, works tho. Big problems here are if you are using things like bonjour on your network (i.e. hooking the printer into your base station). I tried setting up a portmap for bonjour - no good. I've heard on the grapevine that doing this type of thing requires costly hardware/software - so screw that. Anyhow, that will get its only blog.

What else is coming up - oh, so I'm working on something I'm calling "the pipeline". This will be a linux setup that automatically downloads, repairs, and converts video - all in linux (cause i'm so sick of windows right now I could scream). Maybe not fully automatic, I'd still have to establish the downloads but i'm thinking I'll use inotify (I should say, pynotify ;) ) as the trigger mechanism. Should be cool, stay tuned.

I will also post my mediatomb config in its entirity one of these days. Really tho there's not much I can post here that isn't on 100 other websites, I just like the idea of being a complete source.