NodeWygant

[Russell Senior]

Responding to complaints and in order to facilitate any future
enhancement, I went by today and swapped a Buffalo WZR600DHP back in
for the Alix that had been doing duty there. The Alix had an ethernet
devoted to the roof, and another one dedicated to a hard wire to one
of the apartments. The WAN port used up the remaining ethernet
interface. There had once been an additional hard wire that led to an
office in the building basement, now vacant. In order to add another
ethernet run into an under-served apartment, we needed more ports. In
addition, the Buffalo is a dual-band 802.11n router, compared to the
Alix that had only a single Ubiquiti SR2 802.11g radio. Even taking
into account the penetration problems of the 5GHz band, the 11n might
help a little.

One peculiarity, thus far unresolved, is that the Buffalo (and not
just this particular one) seemed to have some trouble booting. The
blinken lights seemed to indicate it was in some kind of reboot loop.
It ultimately recovered and booted. This was a heisenbug. It only
appeared when you could not investigate. A Buffalo in my testbed with
serial console did not exhibit this behavior, even when flashed with
the identical image. We had seen this same thing (apparently) a few
months ago when NodePatch was preparing to replace his gateway. It
seemed like unplugging the ethernet *might* help. It seemed like
cold-booting was worse than a warm reboot, but none of it was
consistent enough to form a firm hypothesis. Something to keep an eye
on.

FYI.

--
Russell Senior, President
rus...@personaltelco.net