main December 2021

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6 participants
164 discussions

Mesh WiFi and Linux - experiences and recommendations wanted
by Chris Green 27 Dec '21

27 Dec '21

We have a big house and parts of it have 1930s brick walls so to provide reasonable WiFi coverage needs several APs in addition to the Draytek 2860n router which does the VDSL as well. At present, we have wired ethernet to the following:- Draytek 2860n in my study upstairs, provides reasonable WiFi upstairs (not heavily used anyway). VDSL (FTTC) comes in here. TP-Link TD9980 router used as an AP in the breakfast room at the back of the house, provides WiFi in breakfast room, kitchen and outside, seems pretty reliable. Draytek 2820n used as AP in the lounge, covers lounge and dining room, this needs replacing as it's showing its age. Tenda W311R used as AP in my wife's Cabin which is thirty or forty metres from the house, UTP ethernet cable is buried. Works pretty much OK in the cabin except, occasionally, when the RJ45 plug gets pulled out! :-) Each router has its own SSID, '2860n', 'breakfast', 'lounge', 'cabin'. I just disconnect and reconnect my laptop as I go back and forth between the breakfast room and the lounge (I have a two character command line script to do it for me). People with mobile phones seem to manage reasonably OK but I suspect it's not ideal for them. However, as noted above, the Draytek 2820n is getting a bit unreliable (dropped connections, odd other quirks) and its wired switch is only 100Mb/s so wired clients in the lounge are limited to 100Mb/s when using the LAN. So I'm looking for something to replace the 2820n. As you can see from the above I'm not one to buy new stuff when it's not necessary, all my 'APs' are actually old routers with the WAN side not used. I *do* need wired ethernet on most of them, the lounge has an Onkyo box and the TV wired, the breakfast room has a Gigaset base station, the cabin has my wife's laptop connected to it quite frequently. So, I've been sort of wondering whether a 'mesh' system will make life easier in the house, pension off the 2820n and the TD9980, ignore the WiFi from the 2860n and have (say) three wired backhaul mesh APs providing coverage. Will this *actually* work for my laptop, or will it simply stay stuck on the first AP it finds? As far as I understand it mesh depends on the *clients* co-operating to some extent and moving from AP to AP and I'm not at all sure my Linux clients are going to do that well. Alternatively should I just do a straight one-for-one replacement of the 2820n with a 'proper' AP? So recommendations and ideas please. If I go for 'mesh' my requirements are:- Web configuration (I hate configuring with a 'phone) Wired backhaul easy Several gigabit wired connections per AP (I think this may be a killer) For a replacement AP I'm after:- Web configuration Gigabit switch incorporated May have to be a router I suppose, if so easy to ignore WAN Finally I don't want to spend hundreds of pounds on this, I *might* stretch to the sort of £150-200 area for a mesh system if I'm persuaded that it will really improve things but that's about my limit. -- Chris Green

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Any Drupal or Node.js experts here?
by Mark Rogers 04 Dec '21

04 Dec '21

I have been asked for assistance upgrading an existing site from Drupal 8 to 9, although this is complicated by it running on a Bitnami stack (which to my knowledge will mean that the site actually needs migrating to a new Bitnami instance with newer PHP versions on it). Similarly, a Node.js v10 application which needs upgrading to v14. I know PHP well, but only having passing acquaintance with Drupal, Bitnami and Node.js. This likely isn't work I would want to undertake myself, so I'm looking for people who would be interested in doing it (commercially, of-course). Any interest? Happy to discuss on- or off-list although unsurprisingly I can't share specifics publicly. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0344 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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OT: Debugging a weird web quirk
by Mark Rogers 03 Dec '21

03 Dec '21

I host a wordpress multi-site install for personal use. My Dad has a site on it, and he's come to me with a weird issue that I can't even figure out how to start debugging! If you visit the site in Chrome: https://www.lyveden.org.uk/ .. and visit a page with images, eg "Garden Revealed", you can click on the images to see them full size. However, when you click "back", the browser reverts briefly to the page before showing the image again, and if you click back a second time you are returned o the previous page (the one prior to the one you opened the image from). Dad has reproduced this on three PCs (two Ubuntu, one Windows). I couldn't initially reproduce it until I tried in a private tab, which might be a clue. I tried using Chrome's developer tools to see what was going on but nothing stood out and I was quickly out of my depth! I know it's not Linux related (highly doubt it's a server issue!) so it's OT, but does anyone have any clues? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0344 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Capturing a web request (server-side)
by Mark Rogers 01 Dec '21

01 Dec '21

Background: I have some hardware which can make a REST request when an input changes. I'm trying to send that request to a ThingsBoard server but it's generating a mostly useless error (it indicates that the JSON won't decode but won't tell me what's being received). If I direct it to a PHP script on a different server which just logs the POST data, everything looks OK and if I copy+past that same data into a commandline curl request to the TB server it works fine. So whatever is failing is more subtle. So what I want to do is set up a temporary server-side script that will log everything that is received in an HTTP request (URL, POST/GET data, headers, etc). I can then point the hardware at it, and then also the working curl commandline, and see what is different. Any suggestions as to how to do this? Or how better to describe what I' trying to do so I can Google it more effectively? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0344 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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main December 2021