Well, I’m happy to report that some actual work has started on the atelier. The dirt hole has taken the form of a 21x12' rectangle that will soon become my audio room. Of course, Henry and Max had to check it out, but I didn’t let them go too near the construction. Robert had to call the Bibb County inspector with some questions—he does most of his contracting work in Houston Country. Hopefully, progress will follow quickly from this point.
In other news: since Cox fixed the WAN signal, I have been tweaking the network so that it’s as fast as it can be. As I mentioned elsewhere, this included my upgrading the TP-Link Archer A6 to new firmware via OpenWRT. This all seemed to go well, but the router now drops the wifi every so often for about 10–15 seconds. As you can imagine, this is infuriating, so I decided to upgrade just the wifi to a mesh system. I got the Eero Pro 6E system. It was easy to set up, but—of course!—just naming the new network the same as the old one (including the password) did not work. I had to go to each computer and IOT device and update each one. This is not a big deal, but it was time consuming. The Sonos speakers and Arlo cameras were the worst.
But, after several misses, everything seems to be working again. My Archer A6 is still the brains of the LAN, and wifi is just a bridged network. I’m sure I’ll discover a few broken bits as I continue to use the new system, but I’m happy with it so far. The wifi does seem much more spritely. And I have one more base station that will go in the sound shed. As I’m uncertain how much longer the A6 will last, I’m thinking of upgrading to a Protectli Vault Pro VP2420—a more robust, pfSense router.
My grad students have a due date approaching, so I have been extra busy with that. However, the semester’s end is in sight, just over that mountain range.