I’ll keep this brief, really so, because this is mainly an aide-memoire for when this horrific bodge breaks in the next, ooh, month or so. But, for context:
The problem:
Our office/studios are in a shed at the bottom of the garden (~15m). Wifi / wireless LAN just reaches, intermittently.
The solution:
Set up an ethernet network in the shed itself, and connect (‘bridge’) that network to the house wifi with a Raspberry Pi.
Kit:
1x Raspberry Pi (Pi 2 Model B; mine overclocked to ~1150MHz) plus SD card and reader; an old ethernet switch and cables; quite a lot of patience.
A bit more detail:
This step-by-step is going to be a bit arse-about-face, in that the order of the steps you’d actually need from scratch is completely different from the max-frustration, highly circuitous route I actually followed. Not least because I already had a Pi with Ubuntu on:
- Get a Pi with Ubuntu on it. This will be acting as the wireless bridge to connect the LAN to the wifi; and also serve IP addresses to other hosts on the LAN (network buffs: yes, I realise this is a crap solution). This is the second-easiest step by a mile; see: this guide for MATE and follow it. We’ll set the Pi up to run without a monitor or keyboard (‘headless’ – connecting over SSH) later, but for now don’t ruin your relationship unduly, do this bit the easy way with a monitor attached.
- MAKE SURE YOU ChANGE THE DEFAULT UNAME AND PASSWORD ON THE PI, AND WRITE THEM DOWN. Jeez…
- apt-get update the Pi a few times. You’ll thank yourself later.
- Set the Pi up to act as a wifi <–> LAN bridge. There are a lot of tutorials suggesting various ways to achieve this such as this, this, and all of this noise. But ignore them all – with the newest Ubuntu LTS (16.04 at time of writing) this is now far, far, far easier to do in the GUI, and more stable. Just follow this guide.
- Set up some other housekeeping tasks for headless login: enable SSH (see also here); set the clock to attempt to update the system time on boot if a time server’s available (make sure to add e.g. server 0.europe.pool.ntp.org to your /etc/ntp.conf file) and login to the desktop automatically. This last action isn’t necessary, and purists will claim it wastes resources, but this is a Pi 2 and we’re only serving DCHP on it, basically – it can afford that. The reason I’ve enabled this is because it seems to force the WLAN adapter to try to acquire the home wifi a bit more persistently (see below). I’ve tried to achieve the same results using wpa_supplicant, but with no stability and my time is a pretty finite resource, so screw it – I’m a scientist, not an engineer!
- Lastly, I’ve made some fairly heavy-duty edits (not following but at least guided by this and this) to my /etc/network/interfaces file, with a LOT of trial and error which included a couple of false starts bricking my Pi (if that happens to you, reinstall Ubuntu. Sorry.) It now reads (home wifi credentials redacted):
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21# interfaces(5) file used by ifup(8) and ifdown(8)
# Include files from /etc/network/interfaces.d:
source-directory /etc/network/interfaces.d# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
# LOOK at all the crap I tried...
#allow-hotplug wlan0
#iface eth0 inet dhcp
#allow-hotplug wlan0
#iface wlan0 inet manual
#iface eth0 inet auto
#wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
# Yep, that lot took a while :\
# Finally, this worked:
auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wpa-ssid "q***********"
wpa-psk "a******"
# That's it :D - Connect the Pi to your other computers using the switch and miles of dodgy ethernet cabling.
- Disconnect the screen, reboot, and wait for a long time – potentially hours – for the Pi to acquire the wifi. You should now be able to a) ping and/or login to the Pi from other hosts on the LAN, and b) ping/access hosts on the home WLAN, and indeed the wider Internet if your WLAN has a connection(!)
A Media centre from scratch
Lastly of all, having gone to all that trouble, the glaring bandwidth inadequacies of our crap WLAN showed up. Being stingy by nature (well, and because the phone companies in our area insist that, despite living fewer than a day’s march from Westminster, their exchanges have run out of fibre capacities for 21st-century broadband) I decided to mitigate this for the long winter months the simplest way: gather the zillions of mp3s, ripped DVDs and videos from all our devices onto one server. I put an Ubuntu (the same 16.04 / MATE distribution as on the Pi, in fact) onto an old Z77 motherboard my little brother had no use for, in an ancient (~2003) ATX case, with a rock-bottom Celeron new CPU (~£25) plus 4MB SDRAM and cheap spinning drive I had lying about (a 2TB Toshiba SATA, IIRC). This is highly bodgy. So much so, in fact, that the CPU fan is cable-tied onto the mobo, because the holes for the anchor pins didn’t line up. But: it works, and only has to decode/serve MP3s and videos, after all.
I apt-get updated that a few times, plus adding in some extra packages like htop, openssh, and hardinfo – plus removing crap like games and office stuff – to make it run about as leanly as possible. Then, to manage and serve media I installed something I’d wanted to play with for a while: Kodi. This is both a media manager/player (like iTunes, VLC, or Windows Media Player) and also streaming media server, so other hosts on my LAN can access the library by streaming over the ethernet if they want without replicating files.
Setting up Kodi was simplicity itself, as was adding movies and music to the library, but one minor glitch I encountered was reading/displaying track info and artwork, which usually happens on iTunes pretty seamlessly via ID3 tags, fingerprinting, and/or Gracenote CDDB querying. Turns out I’d been spoilt this last decade, because in Kodi this doesn’t happen so magically. Instead, you need to use a tool like MusicBrainz Picard to add the tags to MP3s on your system, then re-scan them into Kodi for the metadata to be visible. The re-scanning bit isn’t as onerous as you’d think – files are left in place, the ID3 tags being used simply to update Kodi’s metadata server (I guess) – but the initial Picard search for thousands of MP3s over a slow WLAN took me most of a night.
However. A small price to pay to actually have music to listen to while I work away writing crap like this in the shed, or shoddy-quality old episodes of Blackadder or Futurama to watch in the evening :p
