Everything, Everything

There are several things I like about Easter. The main one, obviously, is the chocolate. A very close second is the long weekend. Another regular event over Easter is a LAN party held by some friends from university (although it's been a long time since we were at uni!). Unfortunately I couldn't attend it in person this year, but many of the games played at the LAN party are hosted on servers that anyone can join. I hadn't really played Left 4 Dead 2 or Team Fortress 2 since last summer, but I'd like to think I did pretty well.

This was also a good test of the new network connection. I'd previously been using a couple of Netgear Powerline AV adapters to bridge upstairs and downstairs, but the connection wasn't great (blue light would constantly flicker, suggesting an intermittent connection). It was fine for browsing the internet, and games didn't appear to suffer, but streaming things off the fileserver was a bit painful and very slow. Instead of running a gigabit cable and drilling some holes (which would be my preferred choice, but is a lot more effort), I created a wireless bridge instead. I bought a couple of cheap 802.11n wireless access points and configured one as an access point and one to connect to it as a client. This seems to have worked surprisingly well, I'm easily getting 10MB/s between floors. I'm also running this bridge over another 2.4GHz channel, so my original/main 802.11g connection isn't affected and the 5GHz 802.11n connection is also impressively quick (no one else nearby is running 5GHz). This new setup seems to work pretty well (although not flawlessly, I have had to reboot the client a few times when the connection seemed to have slowed down). It'll do until I run a gigabit cable across the width of the house and down a floor (seems unlikely for now).