Setting up a Wireless center

Warning

It is not recommended to do Wireless centers, as the installation and booting from networks have been proven very difficult.

Prerequisits

  • A wireless access point (AP) with bridging enabled, i.e. not acting as a router
  • Server connected to AP.
  • Server configured with a local overlay for wireless setups.
  • mini.iso prepared on a USB for booting clients before installing
  • Copy the .iso image to a USB flash, this will overwrite everything of the USB:
    • Insert flash, it may be automatically mounted so should be unmounted if it’s mounted.
      • To see what is mount: mount
      • To unmount: umount /dev/sdX1
      • To copy: sudo dd bs=4M if=Downloads/mini.iso of=/dev/sdb
    • Now the flash is bootable

Installing a client

  • Turn on the machine, press for instance F12 and choose to boot from USB
  • Press TAB to edit the first “Install” option for Ubuntu
  • Delete the quiet part.
  • Put: ks=http://192.168.10.1/ks.cfg ksdevice=WLAN0
  • When installing, you should be able to choose the wireless network that you have configured

Configuring DIR-635 access points

  1. Reset the device
  2. Attach to a machine and obtain DHCP from the AP
  3. Connect to 192.168.0.1
  4. Setup an un-encrypted wireless, DO NOT REBOOT YET
  5. Go to Network
    1. Disable DHCP
    2. Disable DNS relay
    3. Give the router a static IP, i.e. 192.168.10.2 (must be unique to your network!)
  6. Go to Advanced and disable features you know are useless.
  7. Reboot device
  8. Connect to server on one of the Switch ports, not the internet/WAN port

Tip

Use two access points and configure them on separate channels.

Booting from the network

Once the server is installed, and the network is ready, you need to boot from the network.

However, as computers do not support TFTP via WIFI, you need to:

  1. Boot from a USB flash
  2. Tell the Ubuntu installation program (debinstall) where to find the configuration for automatic installations, and to configure the WIFI in order to retrieve this list.

Creating the bootable USB flash

Retrieve the mini.iso for installing Ubuntu, one which is from the same date as the data drive, but never newer!

Warning

The USB flash you use will be overwritten!

Once downloaded to your Ubuntu/Linux computer:

Run the command df -h and notice which device name corresponds to your USB. If you get this wrong, you can overwrite your hard drive. The device name is /dev/sdX, where X is some letter. /dev/sda is your hard drive.

Make sure that no programs are using or blocking the USB flash. Run the command mount to see what drives are in use. If you see your USB flash’s device name, run the command umount /dev/sdX1 to unmount it.

When you know the device name of the USB, run the following command:

dd if=/path/to/iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4096

Booting the flash

As you are booting from the flash, you have to edit the default entry by adding the following lines:

ks=http://192.168.10.1/ks.cfg ksdevice=wlan0 netcfg/wireless_essid=FAIR

Tip

Do not start too many machines, because the wireless network easily gets congested. 5-10 machines is often the limit.