Preparing the WIFI setup for Barcamp Antwerp
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A while ago, I accepted the challenge of providing a bunch of 150 geeks at a Barcamp with reliable WIFI connectivity. Today, I spent some time preparing the setup.
The hardware will consist out of 5 different wireless access points, all flashed with the Open Source OpenWRT firmware (2.4 kernel, X-WRT interface). The access points are different models form different vendors, but that shouldn’t matter. (Thanks to Amedee for helping me out here!)
What I’m conceiving is a Star WDS-network setup. Depending on which rooms we will have available, this might turn into a Daisy Chain setup next week.
I have some networking experience, but never had to prepare a WIFI setup for 150+ heavy users. This leaves me with some questions:
- Do I enable encryption of some sort? Will the low-end CPU’s of the el-cheapo routers be able to hand that amount of work?
- What about bandwidth control? Can I trust that no-one will clog the whole pipe with an out-of-control bittorrent session?
- I figure most of the traffic will be going to a handful of domains (twitter.com, wordpress.com, flickr.com, vimeo.com, …); Would a (transparent) caching proxy help us out? Or would it be counter-productive, as most barcamp attendants demand real-time data from the Internet?
- What data could I/am I allowed to gather? I’d love to post some (anonymous) statistics afterwards with domain, speed and other trends…
Anyway, lot’s to find out still. Maybe, as this is the first time, I’ll just concentrate on having the network up and running in time and keeping it stable throughout the day.
For those who can’t wait: the ESSID will be . :-)