Church Lab

After many years we recently moved into a newly remodeled church that was built in 1924. I needed to get my lab on-line and what should be a quick "its on line” result, turned into a serious amount of Yak Shaving. 

My lab has always been in the basement of our houses. However, the church doesn’t officially have a basement, it has a cellar. The ceiling is about 5 feet high which is fine for the servers, they don’t care how high the roof is. The builder who redid the church, I guess thought no one would use the space because the ceiling is too low. Step one: hire an electrician to extend the electrical plugs and lights for the servers. The really good news is there was electricity down there to extend. 

When the remodel was done the builder left the original outside walls which are 4 bricks thick. What seems like a previous life, in college, I ran ethernet cable for a telecomm company one summer. Yes those were the days when wireless was not even a thing. Hey you kids get off my lawn!!  While I have moved to wireless for my workstations and who only knows how many IoT devices, I have stayed wired for my servers. 

Now back to 2 points here: I know how to run cable, and those 4 brick thick walls. There is no way I was going to be able to run Ethernet to the servers.  I decided it was time to make the servers wireless. My first inclination was to find some type of wired/wireless bridge. 

There are as many opinions as products on the market as to how to solve this problem. As I was doing my research I had an aha moment. Many years ago I had purchased an airport express to make some wireless speakers. Over time we stopped using them, because we were invited to be a beta tester for Alexa. The express was not even on-line in our new house. There was not really an example of doing what I wanted to do with an airport express. Either it’s obvious so why bother posting it, or I was not googling right, but I decided to fire it up and give it go. 

After searching through boxes, and a firmware update, the airport express was on-line and sure enough it simply passes the ethernet port on it through the wireless it is connected to. My old switch lab is plugged into the express and my entire lab, after a 6 week interlude,  is on my network again.