13-08-09

After not quite getting Hilly up and getting Dancutta running properly yesterday today we worked on finishing up all the loose ends. Finalizing the installs in Dhandabajad and Bedethar so they were properly 'deep frozen' (Basically, unchangeable without a password from their installation due to modifications being made in RAM) as well as, the most fun part, optimizing the network!

Getting the PC's deep frozen was a bit of a hastle, people had been using it and so cookies and minor settings had been spread here and there. With a few hours of effort (and a very enjoyable Dolbot in between!) we got the PC's perfectly set up and frozen though. At least those will be running properly for quite some time.

As said before though, the main effort of the day was not just getting the images of the PC perfect, nor even wrapping and cleaning up (or a goodbye party in the evening).

The main part of the day we spend optimizing the network. Till now most links had been set to a 'low' 1 MBit/S link because this ensures the strongest signal and easiest aiming. However obviously we can get a lot more bandwith through there, and that's what we spend most of the time doing. Increasing the bandwith, playing with frequencies and signal strength to see how we could get the most effective throughput. Quite a delicate process. Links can interfere with each other if the radio's are close together, sometimes certain channels (especially down to Dharan) can have natural interference. And a bigger base bandwith is not always better.

It was a great deal of fun though, seeing the download speeds go from 10 KB/S to the MBit range of actual data transfer speed (lets not forget the large amount of overhead in there).

And of course there was the arranging of our trip back to Kathmandu, work on the paper there will be challenging enough!