Alban’s blog

For 4 years, Radio Esperanzah! capture about 30 hours of live each year for the Esperanzah! festival. Until the 2007 edition, we used various recorders (from Archos Gemini to Tascam Compact Flash recorder). But recording something like 20 concerts with a mobile device consumes a lot of time. Lives at Esperanzah! are performed sequentially on two stages. You need to plug and unplug everything 80 minutes and move the capture system to the other stage. It’s painful.

For this 2007 edition, we betted on a new system : install a computer on each stage for the whole festival. The idea is simple : each “satellite” records continuously and recorded files are retrieved periodically by our NAS server via wifi. No (or less) useless movement, the same setup installed for the three days of festival, no cable to plug/unplug, …

A great idea … but it required a lot of preparation. Here are some of the problems we had to solve.

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To make data transferts through the Abbey of Floreffe, we bought D-Link DWL-G510 wifi cards. A good idea to retrieve via rsync the half hundred hours of live records on the two stages. A good idea .. except when the driver doesn’t work …

My first option was the rt2×00 driver provided by the rt2×00-source debian package. The stable package contains a very old realese of the driver. I tested the unstable one .. which doesn”t compile ..

My second option was the officiel rt61 driver. I followed the very complete explanation on the rt61 driver install provided by Vivek.

But after compiling and installing it, I had to conclude it doesn’t work. iwconfig was unable to set the essid …

At this time, our two wifi satellites were in a bad way .. But Flow proposed the miracle solution : one of his co-workers is a ralink driver hacker. Indeed, Vincent goes me the right advice : use the enhanced legacy drivers. With his help, the right driver was installed in few minutes .. and the wifi card connected our wep network

Let’s do wifi in Esperanzah! And many many many thanks to Vincent.

I’am a french hotel near Avignon, I have a wifi access point but I prefer renting a Windows PC for few euro per hour, I didn’t configure a wifi key but the DNS settings of my SMC router is wrong (and I’m certainly see that like a protection), I never change the default password (”smcadmin”, every SMC user manual says that), who I’am ?

This (nice) hotel is now a free wifi AP nicely configured