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💾 Archived View for singletona082.flounder.online › gemlog › phlog › networkstumble01.gmi captured on 2023-09-28 at 15:54:09. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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On the bright side the raspberry pi serving as both media-share, gopher/ftp server, and personal tinkerbox now has a web interface. This will be exceedingly helpful if I suddenly have wider internet connectivity issues. However the following issues exist in its current form.:

keeping the hotspot active while the home router is active leads to conflicts based on which has the stronger signal strength, as the pi is on my compute desk for the sake of ease of access during testing. This conflict tends to lead to devices swapping to the pi-zero for their connection, which leaves me noticing lag on more demanding sites such as youtube, at least on my tablet where such lag is more noticable due to its less than stellar hardware. There is also the fact that due to how android works, I can't connect to the pi using its hostname with my tablet, which is the major use case. No biggie, I hear you say, Just use the thing's IP address and call it good.' Theoretically yes, but actually conflicts start popping up depending on if you are connecting through the pi or through the router since that gives two disagreeing IP addresses, and the pi tends to react badly or at least tells you to get bent during conflicts.

The biggest flaw of this? There is no automated swapover if a connection can't be found. Pretty much boiling down to the fact that if the router goes away without time to relaunch the access point, there is no external connection to the pi. 'But dude,' I hear the hypothetical objection say, 'Why not leave the access point up?' See the above isue of potential lag and hiccups. I suspect part of it has to do with the router itself, but at the same time? I can't be absolutely sure. Which leads to 'keep the access point turned off unless I have to turn it on.'

So now I need to figure out if there is a way to automatically start the access point if no internet exists, and figure out why termius throws visual errors up. Hard to do terminal work and edit config files when the terminal glitches and shows faulty text, or makes your cursor disappear.

Updating phlog and or adding to the pile of fiction can be done, though in a somewhat roundabout manner even if I can't sort out the termius glitching. All this assumes my tablet will be the primary interface, but ftp works. Jotterpad saves local content as text files. So use FTP to dump those text files into relevant gopher directories, and transfer gophermap to jotterpad's working directory to edit that and replace old with the new. Bit of a duct tape and bailing wire solution, but this level of simplicity along with the laughably low bandwidth requirements are why I wanted to prod at gopher in the first place. So there is that going for me.

Turns out I can add a wifi adaptor and it sounds like I could get a speed boost off of that. Makes sense as the onboard chipset wouldn't have to do double duty, but at the same time the USB interface is a strictly usb 2.0 link. Still, worth looking into.

On the plus side, I can install a capture portal for anyone connecting to the AP. This gives potential down the road. Will have to look into what it would take to have my pi's web server also serve up the gopher content up for those that don't want to bother with a client..