Wireless

by Kulbir Saini on Fedora, Google, GSOC, Hacking, LAN, Life, Linux

Whats keeping me busy lately

Previous week was a bit more busier than I actually expected. I wonder why I have to attend a lot of meetings. There were 3-4 of them last week.

Constant complaints about wireless are killing and sometime frustrating. As rishabh pionted out “Become a sysAdmin at IIIT” as a never do thing. I don’t agree completely. But sometimes you get frustrated enough by the complaints and incompetence of your colleagues to say that. Keeping that apart, being a sysAdmin is real fun. You get to play with most critical servers at the place. You learn things that you will never learn in a course or project. (I wonder what we actually learn in a course 😛 One thing I can immediately point out is the attendence management.)

Apart from above, I have been working on IntelligentMirror, my GSOC project and its sister project Youtube Caching using squid. I have achieved 100% youtube caching without altering the refresh patterns in squid. That means your squid will not malfunction and will cache youtube videos successfully and in a browsable fashion 🙂 Going to release version 0.2 very soon. Working on caching Google and metacafe videos as well.

And last but not the least, sleep time has increased from 6-8 hrs to 12-16 hrs/day 😛

PS1 : This is the funniest post, I have ever seen. A must see for MS by research people 😛

PS2 : Also maruti has posted some nice crap 😛

 
by Kulbir Saini on Computers, Google, GSOC, Internet, LAN, Life, Linux, Yum

Recent Happenings

  1. Entire wifi was down for almost two hours today. Emergency situation. I called whoever I could but just wasted time and money. Wifi admin would have felt totally surprised after getting 25-30 missed calls from my number 😛 Pinged back after an hour and things were back in tune. Thank god!!
  2. Celebrated Yum Bug Day today. We fixed and closed a lot of bugs. Was a very good experience.
  3. GSOC project is going fine.
  4. IntelligentMirror is now hosted on fedorahosted.org 🙂 Checkout the source code here.
  5. Hooked to Gossip Girls 🙂
  6. Playing cricket at 6AM after night out is now becoming a habit. Will post about it sometime 🙂
  7. Duration and frequency of BC sessions is on the rise. OBH really rocks 🙂
  8. Intake of caffeine is on the rise as well. Thanks to OBH coffee machine 🙂
  9. Chatting a lot these days. Don’t ask why ? 😛
  10. Blogged a lot this month 🙂

🙂

 
by Kulbir Saini on Fun, Internet, LAN, Life, Wireless

Shifted to OBH

Finally after a lot of mess and competition, I shifted to OBH yesterday. Finally, I am free from the job of a UPS restarter every few hours. And the damn job was not paid 😛 Kaidi(prisoner) number 200501043 has been shifted from NBH-C-8 to OBH-117 😀

I am expecting a lot of benefits from OBH to make my techie life easier and happier. The wireless here goes down at last after NBH and GH. And if wireless is down here, then its down everywhere 😀 There are more access points per person in OBH. The wireless works consistently. No break ups. The UPS here doesn’t suck.

Apart from technological advantages, there are other benefits as well. My room faces the newest OBH extension block and there are tress all over the place. Its cool even in the hottest part of the day. And night is a pleasure here. I wake up in the morning, open my door and what I see is really an eye candy. Only trees. Nothing else is visible here. I am loving this place.

Its a law of nature. With advantages come disavantages ( I don’t know why I suck so much in framing sentences 🙁 ). Room and bathRooms are a bit smaller here as compared to NBH and all my friends are in still NBH 🙁 I miss you guyz. Make if fast to OBH… please…

 
by Kulbir Saini on Computers, Internet, LAN, Life

Wireless Crisis

I was proud to know that IIIT was the only academic institute in India to have wifi campus when I joined IIIT. Back then wifi offered good connectivity and bandwidth on Intranet and it was a feel good that you don’t have to look for wires to go online. Sit anywhere with your laptop and you are ready to go online.

As time passed, the no. of students using wifi increased due to huge intake of students in different branches. The wifi infrastructure which provided a speed of 20MBps per user at some point of time is now like a 56kbps modem line which you won’t prefer if you are not out of options. Apart from the decreased bandwidth per user, other problems arose in course of time like the switches grew older, UPSs lost their efficiency etc.

The funniest part of wifi infrastructure currently are these UPSs. They are attached to each and every switch in hostels. Whenever power goes down, the UPS also goes down and start screaming as if they are designed to kill everyone in the vicinity. The backup they provide is hardly a minute or so (not more than two minutes surely). These UPSs are so intelligent that whenever power comes, they can’t sense it and they need to be restarted. I would like to congratulate the designer to make such high class UPSs to make our life miserable. So, we have UPSs that goes down immediately on power cut and needs to be restarted when power is back. The only advantage of having these UPSs is that our life is miserable.

Another fun part is NBH(New Boys Hostel, one of the hostels at IIIT campus) switch. This 3Com switch is too old to sustain the peak data transfers. This switch goes down every 3-4 hours and needs to be restarted manually using a hard reboot ( hard reboot means cutting the power supply and then restoring it.). This switch is kept in a locked room and whenever one has to restart it, he has to look around for the key in cellar.

I am afraid that due to the continuously increasing load, some day entire wifi will collapse and we will have serious wireless crisis at IIIT. Students Lab Committee is trying hard to convince people around to come up with alternate solutions. I hope we will have some solutions soon.

PS : No PSs this time 🙂