As it sometimes happens personal stuff has taken hold of my life and stopped me from doing anything major with anything technology related. I decided that I should pick a little project to pick up some new skills, so I’ll be setting up Cisco’s AIR-CTVM Wireless controller along with a couple LAP-1142Ns 802.11n (draft) access points that I picked up off of eBay to get rid of the DD-WRT APs which haven’t been entirely cooperative. For example, the Netgear WNR834B v2 will only use the base channel assigned with the second channel being two channels above it (currently channels 6 and 8) which is clearly not optimal for throughput.

I’m going to be rearranging my home network to segment it a bit more and do some more with routing. I want to keep the LAPs running off the 3560-24PS with PoE power instead of powering them with external bricks, so unfortunately each AP will be limited to 100mbit of throughput — that’s actually still better than what I get now over the 2.4GHz N AP, so it’ll still be a usable throughput improvement.

I’ll also be able to actually do some L3 segmenting instead of needing to share a VLAN across physical boundaries for the ‘dumb’ AP bridges currently in place.

I’ve been doing some work on IP management software, and while a lot of the back-end functionality is currently there for calculation, I’d like to rewrite some of it for speed. There are parts that are written strictly for readability using strings instead of bit compares, and they’re much slower than I’d like them to be for large address spaces. I should have something interesting to show if I can manage to put a little more time into it.