The Scottish Boinc Team

Took the plunge and decided that this was the way forward but first let me issue a very stark warning about Wireless Routers in general ...

I mistakenly believed that I could set a new router to offer identical SSIDs on identical passwords & that it would then become a slot-in replacement for an old router. No, no, no, no and ... thrice NO !!! (okay so that is more than 3)

It does work on some devices at 2.4GHz but AFAIK not at all on devices which use 5GHz channel. Seems to be that some kind of security 'salt' is added to the WLAN password (analagous to a Boinc weak key) and they simply won't reconnect automatically to any other router.

For someone who has maybe 40 headless boinc crunchers all over the house (including rasp pi) connecting by wireless, this is extremely bad news as each one needs to gain a screen, keyboard and mouse in order to re-configure WLAN communications with the new router. This has not been fun and indeed is not yet completed

Nightmare!
This is the sort of scenario that made me hold on to my various KVMs for 20 years.And my farm , even at it's peak, is a fraction the size of yours.
Good luck & stay strong! We are all routing for you!

what type of wireless devices are they and what OS?

FWIW, I use Netgear Orbi and have been happy with it

Megacruncher wrote: ↑Sat Oct 03, 2020 1:23 pm We are all routing for you!

very very drole

Yeah, Netgear Orbi is another mesh system. I stayed with Asus because my trusty old router can just become another AiMesh node when I've plucked up the courage to factory reset and upgrade firmware.

To clarify - the AiMesh has been a dream to install. Very impressive. The darned problem is going around 40 headless machines telling them the new SSID and password. All ubuntu or raspios apart from one Windows machine

I went for a Class A network as 10.0 is a helluva lot easier to type than 192.168

Allocated new fixed IPs for everything according to the primary function of the device. Most devices are allocated 2 adjacent IP addresses - an even number for wired and an odd number for wireless. Each segment can therefore have around 128 machines. Darned rasp pi goes off with a lot

10.0.0.0-255 => work and home segment
10.0.1.0-255 => boinc main crunchers segment

10.0.5.0-255 => boinc raspberry pi / SBC segment

10.0.250.0-255 => DHCP segment

10.1.xx.xx will maybe get used if another farm joins me via VPN. I don't know how to do this though

I am falling out of love with AiMesh - too many router reboots needed if wireless is heavily used - and it really is