Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>]

on Wed, Sep 03, 2008 at 01:51:08PM -0400, Michael Czeiszperger wrote:
> I've been tasked with getting wifi into our new school (The Riverrock 
> School on the Haw), and on a limited budget everyone is asking me why we 
> can't just use the wifi signal from the  Saxapahaw General Store which is 
> in the same building given we have permission from the store owners.  The 
> problem is this is an old textile mill, with really thick walls and floors, 
> and we're 300 feet at least from the store directly through many walls and 
> two floors.  Even if I could convince the people responsible for the rooms 
> between us to put in wifi repeaters, we'd still have to get the signal 
> through two floors and several walls, and I can't imagine that would work 
> well.

Brick didn't seem to stop the wifi signal back when we were at the
offices at Brickhaven, FWIW. Have you tried it?

OTOH, plaster and especially old plaster and steel rooves seem to be
more of a problem. I've had to set up three/four Airport Extremes at the
house due to that, but if you can shoot the signals around big metal
objects like roofs the mesh network works okay. You might try getting
the cable modem and a couple of WRT54Gs and one of the many OpenWRT
firmwares (I'm running Tomato here, and like it a lot) and set up a wifi
mesh network / WDS. Then just keep adding base stations to deal with
dead spots, or move them around until coverage is how you want it.

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