Pimp My WiFi Ep. 2 - SICK home business tech upgrade!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2017-05-06
·
3,425 words · ~17 min read
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welcome friends to pimp my Wi-Fi is that
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how pimps talk i actually don't know but all i know is
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pimp my Wi-Fi sounds an awful lot like pimp my wife
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and that is not the same thing
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so this be my neighbor john's house okay
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i'll stop talking like that that's awful john runs a home business making sports
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scoreboards that are both affordable to purchase and operate thanks to their
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battery-backed solar-powered design and
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they also operate in all weather conditions this is canada after all
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radio control oh yeah that too my scoreboards are designed built and
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assembled right here in canada the microcontroller chip that runs the
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whole system is again designed and programmed by me
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i've written the software to do this the printed circuit boards are again
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designed by me the electronics and so on the pc boards themselves are built in
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richmond bc they're sent back to me as a blank board i assemble the components in
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it and test it right here then once all
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that's done and tested and everything's okay i
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build and assemble the coils right here again in the shop
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well that's great john but what i couldn't help noticing when we were
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working on that homemade CPU water block that let me cheat in scrapyard wars
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season two is how horribly out of date
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some of your gear was i mean
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an athlon 64 pc running your cnc
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usb drives to transfer files from one computer to
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another are you still using this computer
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the entire business business's backups are on a single hard drive
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and are you still using the isp provided wireless access point with the name
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telus 1995. i didn't think anyone had done that
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since 1995.
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no no i'm afraid i'll need to reject this reality and substitute my own which
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is why we're here over a year later and
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ubiquity networks the makers of the access point i ended up buying in simlim
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square in pit my wi-fi episode 1 has
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agreed to sponsor a full tech makeover
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for my neighbor john even going as far as to send out one of their technicians
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to make sure everything's running a-okay super hunky-dory and
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paying for us to have mark the contractor uh help us with anything that
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might involve power tools so let's get
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crack-a-lacking let's run through the rationale behind the gear we're using
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our UniFi security gateway pro is essentially a router that can be managed
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from the UniFi controller it handles our packet processing and dhcp
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our unify switch 8 handles both active and passive power over Ethernet with
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enough ports for all of the devices we have on site
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our UniFi ap pro wireless access points are designed to handle a much higher
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client load but our deployment here is more about killer 802.11 ac coverage so
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that dropped skype calls are a thing of the past and the UniFi cloud key is the
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low power Linux computer on a stick that manages all these other network devices
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to keep them working perfectly okay so obviously this has got to go um this is
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a single access point it's up in the corner of the house i think i have
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better reception from my house than john has in certain areas of his
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house so here's what i'm thinking in
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terms of getting full coverage in this place with i had planned for three
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access points so i wanted one up here for wife approval factor
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and that will mostly service the soundscape entertainment sound
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recording studio in there and one of the kids bedrooms
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because there will be a hard line in the master bedroom for the computer that
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they operate there so if we have slightly less reception to the master
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then it's not the end of the world i wanted to put it here
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the wife gave that gave that feel absolutely no
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way okay so that'll probably do the upstairs
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right what can i it should okay you should easily cover the upstairs okay
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for the downstairs to keep cabling simple i wanted to have the access point
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in the garage which is just on the other side of this wall
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so that means great strength for where the business is operating that should
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cover this living room area really well
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now we've got one two three walls between it
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and the den however
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we want to bring one more out of the crawl space
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and put it here to cover the backyard and then i'm thinking hopefully
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the back half of the bottom floor oh yeah so the cable runs that those gentlemen
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are getting going up there are all going to come down to this corner behind me
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where we're going to have Ubiquiti's edge router light we're gonna have one
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of their PoE switches so that we don't have to run additional power to all of
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our access points we're gonna have a proper nas with real-time redundancy and
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finally we're gonna have one of their little controller doodads that makes it
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so we don't have to have a dedicated pc to handle seamless handoff from access
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point to access point while clients are roaming around the house
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so the great thing about any tech project is you don't have to create
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drama like you do with a lot of reality shows
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the plan was to have an adsl line down here so we could move our networking
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stuff downstairs and run everything out from there into the crawl space
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but we actually don't know if either of these phone lines are live
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okay so i'm going up to see if i can find out where those cables terminate so
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i got to go i don't know what about 10 feet over
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that way okay oh ow my head
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oh crap there's a okay there's not a clear path
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there's there's a kind of a wall here like a not kind of a there's literally a
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wall so give me a moment
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try not to fall through the ceiling
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pull what we call a dennis here
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you know what no i think i got him i think i got him i think i see uh
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i think i see what's going on here so it looks like only two are connected
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the two of the wire pairs on the beige cables yeah
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okay so that would explain it because you need four pairs for uh voice and
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data okay cool so all we gotta do is lines connect them
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then right there we go okay
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so that's how that goes over to that corner
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uh one of them is actually in this um
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this guy so one of them has uh let me have a look
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yeah that's that's it hold on
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this one coming in here so that one looks like it has three
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wires connected oops the older installations they didn't
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actually have to use like a go by the actual standard color coding
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so you could get one color that is this but it's actually it has another
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purpose great
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well i can tell you right now these colors look to be kind of random because
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the red and the green are not connected to red and green on the other side i don't think okay so what i just need to
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go up there with a roll of electrical tape and twist them together or
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no it's not ideal um it might work but
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um it's apparently what was done in the first place i do see that
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i can't get into how reliable that would be for data if it did work well it
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stopped working so about that reliable yes
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we can certainly try and see what happens we can try it and see if it works immediately now yes and then we
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can twist some caps on it and make sure it doesn't go anywhere at that point
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so do you want me to go back up there and uh start twisting wires together or sure we
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can we can try that and the other thing is if we had the
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i don't know how accessible that room is he's running the line to do the closet
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uh oh no but there won't be any easy way to get it down the wall and out yeah not really
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not tidy anyway it's not life approved yeah
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so that's why we didn't want the uh the networking closet upstairs
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some some thought was given to this just not quite enough
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just the line is tech tips way
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red to red green to green good so far
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huh it looks like the black came off okay so this is an improvement over
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before it's flashing faster now let's see
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do it for sync do we want solid hey
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we've got a line okay all right my uh my ghetto pimp style
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just twist them together i mean we'll fix it but um awesome that'll work for
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now good one problem solved let's just wait
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for the next one to happen so behind me in progress we've got
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george leading the charge on creating a custom enclosure for that cnc mill that
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we used to create the custom water block that should dampen some of the noise
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that comes out of it allowing john to have it running during the night
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something that he currently cannot do due to noise regulations in this
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neighborhood so in summary what george is going to be building is a 2x4
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construction shroud that's going to allow for all the existing functionality
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so easy access to things like these uh drive bands here in case they need to be
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replaced the ability for the hose to continue to take away the waste material
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while the machine is working and most importantly a complete enclosure with
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you know baffles for exhaust vents to take away as much of
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the noise as possible so we've got half of our Ethernet runs
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done these are the ones to the master bedroom as well as the closet upstairs
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all that's left now is the one that goes through the crawl space out to the back
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and a surprise one that goes over to where the new adsl line comes in to
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where the networking closet is going to be here in this corner so i actually
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wouldn't mind getting in here to do the actual pc upgrade
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mercifully the old one has been apparently taken out back and shot
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because it's not here anymore but mike is currently working on just getting all
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the latest firmwares running on the security gateway the PoE switch and the
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cloud controller so i'm gonna go shopping
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so these are gonna run the cnc mill as well as the coil winding machine
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and they should be just much smaller uh
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quieter there's no fans so they're less likely to collect us should be a better
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overall solution not to mention they're faster
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i swear if you want Windows update to do something be in a hurry
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all right let's do this thing
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i'll take one of these actually no i'm kidding i'll take a couple of the ve-247s here
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one and
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two
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so we've run into a small problem i just kind of assumed we could get a monitor
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ARM at best buy but brandon looked it up and everything's online only
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so i don't know where to buy a monitor ARM
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well try visions but honestly i don't have a lot of hope
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for this well then i will take them thank you good sir here you go
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this is a lot more than i wanted to pay but
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these do look really nice and these should work perfectly
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for what we need and they had exactly two
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so that just saved my bacon we now have everything we need
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we're ready to head back to the job site
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that's typical right you go away for an hour because you got to buy something
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you come back where is everybody
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must be on lunch all right okay so these are all programmed yes
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they are okay so why don't we go ahead
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and these ones we'll deal with in the corner
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once praxis is done with his wiring up there but why don't we go ahead and install
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these then all right let's do it
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i got this i got this got this bro
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but i might have to take off my pimp sunglasses because i can't see a damn thing
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are you gonna fit in there with your hat on he's trying to get me to take off the
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hat no don't do it but no i'm not taking off the hat
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taking off the hat is the wrong thing to do for any pimp pimp always wears his hat
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okay so we're just basically a two by four just a cut off just a small cut off
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keep going until it starts teeter-totter beautiful right there
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now i can take the two by four right here there you go and then we can
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slide it right on okay excellent
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excellent good good slow and easy voice
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and slide it to the back there and we're going to slide it off
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okay beautiful on the edges here yeah okay
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back there all right yeah could we have um
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it might make our lives a little bit easier if once we've got it up this
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slides away john oh awesome thank you okay okay guys
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pull it out pull it out go ahead let it down straight down there
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you go oh we did it guys okay now we want to center it
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yep your way
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yeah we just right there
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take the two by fours out we're good
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cut this guy right now so okay yep
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yep and then we'll lift this side and do the same let's see
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because when this is when this sucker is spinning it vibrates quite a bit
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okay so while those guys finish up the box for the cnc i'm gonna go ahead and
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get started on rolling out all of the other gear that i have so i've got
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the zotac pcs all loaded up with fresh copies of Windows 10
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wireless mouse a brand new laptop it's a
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ux303 from ASUS as well as
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yes from our friends over at seagate and synology we've got a new nas that is
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going to have four terabytes of raid 1 storage so
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time to get cracking on that so i'm not sure 100 exactly how it works
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but it looks like uh
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yeah it looks like it kind of clips in somehow
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and then just slides on
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so george and his guys have made about three metric but tons of progress on the
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enclosure over here check this out the monitor ARM is installed the
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keyboard and mouse are on this gorgeous little tray that george
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stress tested so to speak to make sure it's strong enough to hold a keyboard
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and mouse and we've got more progress over here in
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the corner mike over here has terminated most of the Ethernet jacks which means
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that we're almost ready to switch between the old network and the new one
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but first we have to do the before of
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our before and after test so in a nutshell we're going around to four
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different locations the workshop the upstairs audio room the dining room
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here where i saw john using his computer to have a voip call and the pool side
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and we're doing four tests in each location we're doing a file transfer
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test we're using insider to see what the actual signal strength is in decibels
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and we're using that same software to see
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how many overlapping wireless networks there are in each of those locations
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because the reality of it is even if it's performing fine right now in the
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middle of the day on a wednesday when everyone gets home and they start
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streaming netflix those 2.4 gigahertz networks that are nearby are gonna cause
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interference and hurt john's network's performance that's one of the reasons
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we're switching over to five gigahertz
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so with all the before testing done all that's really left now is for mike to
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finish up his Ethernet terminations and for me to mount the last access point
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up here in the corner of the garage slash workshop
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uh yeah we're ready i've done all my before tests
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okay so our server closet is up and running
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we can access either the UniFi cloud key
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configuration which we shouldn't need to do because mike's gone ahead and set all
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that up or we can access the UniFi controller which is what is effectively
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running on that so we're going to go ahead and manage that and make sure that
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all of our aps are showing up that that is going to be key here
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and there you have it three aps
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closet garage and outdoor and
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the next step before we do our test our performance test
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is actually this is a really cool feature you go into rf environment
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and you can pick either 2.4 gigahertz or 5 gigahertz and do a scan it takes about
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5 minutes but this kind of thing is worth it if you're trying to avoid using
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the same channels as everybody around you and you want the best possible
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performance on your network at all times i'd recommend doing a scan like this
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during a time when your neighbors are likely to be actually using their
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internet so sometime around seven to nine pm in the evening
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so we're finally done we've actually been waiting a few weeks for some
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acoustic panels for the inside of the
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cnc enclosure but i am ready to present
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you guys with our wireless signal strength tests so by the pool side
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much much stronger you can actually browse the internet at full speed from
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out there whereas i couldn't even get a connection to the old wi-fi access point
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from the dining room table we're looking at an improvement there as well same
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thing here in the warehouse so wireless signal strength has improved overall but
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that wasn't the only thing we were doing here we were improving the ergonomics of
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this workstation which as you can tell has definitely been dramatically
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improved and second of all we were improving the
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acoustics of this workstation so this enclosure is now pretty much done
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it still needs a little bit more acoustic foam but we are ready to do a
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before and after test and find out if john's productivity can improve thanks
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to being able to operate the cnc at night so we're gonna head outside and do
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a before and after sound test with the panel open versus having the panel
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closed and see if we can hear the difference all right john fire it up for
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the before test
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i don't know if he's gonna be able to hear me okay john close it down
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sorry i was saying close the lid
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so it's pretty loud
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not bad can the mic pick that up
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not bad at all awesome all right so mission accomplished thank
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you for checking out the second ever episode of pimp my Wi-Fi let me know what
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you guys would like to see if we were to do a third episode of this series
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see you guys later you know it is
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is that how they walk