Suite news from the Hill and the Burg

Bristol Wireless’ networking guru Lloyd Cohen has posted to our daily list covering what he did before the Christmas holidays with Debian Linux, a pile of recycled computers and two accommodating locations in Windmill Hill and St Werburghs.

He starts by saying that before Christmas we installed two new LTSP suites.

The first was at Holroyd House on Windmill Hill, in the community room at the base of the building. This entailed BW volunteers Jim Farrand and Lloyd dropping a run of weatherproof ethernet cable down the side of the building from our equipment in the liftroom on the rooftop 18 floors above. The suite comprises a server (configured by Ben Green) in the lift room and 3 diskless thin clients booting on the ground floor. Holroyd House is just one hop away from our interconnect at BMEX in Bristol University, giving it one of the best internet connections in the city.

The second suite was installed at Mina Park Hostel. Lloyd spent a day running cable through the building to the rooftop where Lloyd installed an all-in-one wifi box client which seems to be working well. Although Lloyd has had to revisit the hostel to correct a loose cable – the occupants seem happy and are using the system. The server is a recycled Dell PowerEdge server, the two clients are redundant machines recycled as thin clients. Several of the permanent residents are considering running extra cable through the building at their own cost so they can extend the access to their rooms.