[PyCON-Organizers] OLPCs not considerate wireless users

[Rob Savoye]

Noah Kantrowitz wrote:
> We can always lock the mesh interface to a single channel, and keep the
> normal APs on the two others. Also turning down the Tx power will reduce
> interference with normal 802.11b/g. As an absolute fall-back, there is a
> snippet of commands on the wiki to disable the wireless interface
> ("Airplane mode" or similar IIRC).

  I think banning them from PyCON is over reacting. I've been at
multiple conferences with multiple OLPCs turned on for days. This
includes conferences like Chaos Camp, with 100 times the wireless
traffic of Hackers. At the Camp, they even had several other mesh
networks running with zero problems. But yes, at Hacker's it was a
serious pain in the neck.

 There were two main problems. People kept rebooting the OLPCs, which
re-enabled the network after I had disabled it. I finally had to make
sure it stayed off after a reboot of any of the 3 units.

  The other problem was originally thought to be the high density of
APs, about 9 within a few hundred feet, and several within 25 feet.
(down the length of the hallway) At other conferences (like the Camp)
the APs were mostly dozens, if not many hundreds of feet away. After
brainstorming with some other folks at Hacker's, our feeling is the
problem was caused by having multiple APs with the same identical SSID,
but multiple MACs. This should be easy to reproduce if you can
reconfigure several APs without causing other problems. :-)

  Sorry this response took a few days after the problem was reported, I
was offline on a rare few days of vacation. Yosemite was beautiful!

	- rob -