If the internet is not working, the first thing to check is that
the black WiFi antennae are
still upright and have not been knocked sideways.
First, make sure you understand the physical cabling:
The potato hut WiFi is running DHCP and allocating IP addresses of the form 192.168.1.x where x is a number between 11 and 99 .
The Expo laptops have a dynamic local address of this form, as does any other laptop connecting to this WiFi.
The Gasthof WiFi - which you can still use - is "StaudnGast" and has no WiFi password but there is a login webpage. It allocates IP addresses in the range 192.168.2.x etc. The antenna is now on the first-floor balcony within sight of the tatty hut window.
The Acer Aspire One ("tclaspire3") is on a static address 192.168.1.100 on WiFi but 192.168.200.100 on the ethernet cable. This is the address to use for configuring it using ssh when everything else has failed. So to manage the connection to the Gasthof WiFi you would use
ssh expo@192.168.200.100to run Mark Shinwell's script (re-edited by Sam 2019)
/root/fakenet/runfakenetThis used to need running once or twice a day when the internet stops working, but it was radically fettled in 2022 and so should be much more reliable. Sometimes you may have to walk over to the blue Acer Aspire netbook and run this script directly by typing on its keyboard as the network has collapsed so badly that ssh doesn't work.
The netbook needs to have its persistent networking set up correctly in addition to the script. This is the wicd gui program that has an icon in the top-right of the sceen in the system panel. (Or search in all applications in the Internet section for the wicd application). Set the checkboxes so that the netbook does connect to any network except the Staudingast wifi network, and also tick the 'automatica;lly reconnect' checkbox for the "StaudnGast" network.
Prior to 2018 we used to run an unconnected local network with our own DNS domain name "potato.hut", our own server holding all the website and survey data, and published WiFi as SSID "tattyhut". Updates to the rest of the world were done by taking an up-to-date laptop which had been in the tatty hut to a real internet connection and pushing the changes to the distributed version control system on expo.survex.com to be merged.
In 2017 the hard-drive on our server died which triggered the general reconfiguration to connect the tattyhut to the internet continuously and not to have our own local server. This coincided with a much-improved WiFi service at the Gasthof.
In 2018 and 2019 we had good Internet access at basecamp, but the high-gain system was returned to its owner during Covid.
In 2022 Wifi reception from the gasthaus was very poor. The connection script was improved so that dropped connections were restored more quickly. However the basic bandwidth with a cheap antenna was not enough.
In 2023 a new Wifi device (the Alfa) should restore decent connectivity. We hope this will improve everything to how it was in 2019. However this Alfa has proved to be a right bastard to find the right drivers for. Wookey has had to be inventive in using an Ubuntu PPA to make it work with the Acer Aspire 1.
Also during winter 2023/23 Wookey upgraded the operating system on the Acer Aspire 1 netbook from whatever Linpus dubious system it had been running to a decent Debian distribution. This required much coaxing. As of 26 March, it is still a couple of Debian versions behind where we would want it to be.