Success! This past weekend was our first weekend providing free wireless internet access. I haven’t figured out the exact details that will let me log every access in the way I want to use for trending, but it appears it was used by several people on Sunday. The bigger test of the Indiana District Council yesterday and today, however, is a bigger success! For one, I was actually here :-) But the use was a lot heavier, due to all the brochures on the cafe tables, handed out to people, personalized assistance from yours truly…not that it was needed, the brochure did an admirable job if I do say so myself.

I checked on the stats of how many people were connected at a time throughout the day (the stats-gathering was a bit random but better than nothing) and it looks like the highest number of connections I saw was this afternoon, at about 18 simultaneous users. Yesterday one man I talked to came up to me later and said he was glad there was wireless access and was very appreciative! Given that wireless access was not announced prior to the event, the turnout of people with laptops was still pretty high. Right about right, I’m not sure I would want to support more users than that on the first test. Better a successful slow ramp-up than an all-out crash-and-burn, in my opinion.

While making the rounds on Monday afternoon, I ended up talking to a speaker who had a booth at the Council and ended up showing him how to remove some annoying spyware someone had hacked into showing up on his website, and giving him a pointer to Google Analytics for some more useful stats than the tools his cPanel installation provided.

So…success! There wasn’t a single issue that was made aware of with the wireless the entire time. No complaints, no issues with speed throttling, no issues connecting even though it required a password from the brochure and going through a portal page (I’ll get some more details on how I have this set up when I get a chance). And no issues with things being blocked that shouldn’t have been through ScrubIT. Well, I take it back, there was one issue. One of our volunteers was trying to use a PPTP VPN to connect to her workplace and do some work on downtime. The connection kept timing out and would never connect. The VPN connectoid kept throwing Error 619. Google didn’t turn up anything related, but I suspect it has to do with the connection being double-NATted. I did see someone else’s Cisco VPN connecter work just fine, but that’s just a success story, not related to the PPTP error I’m sure.

But if that’s the worst that happened (and it was)…I’m happy! It’s been a long process through to the release, since I ordered the equipment at the end of last October!