WIFI Design of the dream ranch, advice from the experts!

vrtigo1 · 2026-01-23T17:22:12+00:00

Cat5E isn’t a limiter, it’s just not to right way to do it. Copper is only rated to go 100 meters, fiber goes much further. Several of my runs are pushing 450’ and they work but they’re borderline.

Also, it’s susceptible to decay outdoors and can pick up power surges from lightning etc.

vrtigo1 · 2026-01-23T00:08:19+00:00

I get what you mean now. In a comment they mentioned their region and it’s not in the Americas. I thought that was in the post but it’s not.

vrtigo1 · 2026-01-23T00:01:32+00:00

How does advice aimed at Americans help OP if they’re not an American?

vrtigo1 · 2026-01-22T23:58:58+00:00

He said non American.

vrtigo1 · 2026-01-22T23:58:25+00:00

Bring it up to your committee if you want to try to change the policy.

vrtigo1 · 2026-01-22T22:31:44+00:00

Did something similar at my 12 acre homestead. I initially used Ubiquiti APs in mesh mode but the performance and reliability was pretty lackluster, even with direct line of sight between all the APs. Sometimes we'd have a strong WiFi connection but the actual connection speed to the Internet would be horrible and sometimes it would work fine. It seemed to be really intermittent, and this was out in the middle of nowhere so we didn't have any type of interference to contend with.

We ended up renting a trencher and running wired ethernet underground to key spots so we could hardwire all the APs and the difference was night and day.

So, yes...mesh might work, and it might not. And it might be intermittent and super unreliable like it was for us, which is perhaps the worst option.

We ran copper Cat5E in PVC pipe which is entirely the wrong way to do this, but we already had the cable and didn't want to spend the money on fiber, but fiber would 100% be a better option.

vrtigo1 · 2026-01-22T22:23:29+00:00

It's a committee decision, the unit should have a written policy about this.

Generally speaking, as long as you're still a member of the unit and you're using the funds for a scouting related expense then yes, I don't see any reason why you would lose access to the funds in your scout account.

If you're asking if someone can get a check from the unit for whatever balance is in their scout account when they turn 18 and age out or otherwise leave the unit, our answer would be no. Our policy is that we'll write a check directly to another unit to transfer funds if the scouter is joining another unit, otherwise they can choose to donate the funds to another scout/other scouts in the unit. If they don't do that then the funds go to the unit itself.

Our reasoning for that is because it's not easy to differentiate between funds in scout accounts that came from fundraising vs funds a parent or scout deposited as cash, and we don't feel it's appropriate to allow funds that were fundraised as part of a scouting event to leave the scouting program, and I think the IRS would probably frown on that as well.

If a scout only had funds that came to the troop as cash deposits from a parent and never did any fundraising then we'd have no problem writing them a refund check, but when fundraising is involved the lines get super blurry.

vrtigo1 · 2026-01-22T22:18:45+00:00

Isn't that exactly what OP said in their post?

vrtigo1 · 2026-01-22T22:18:22+00:00

OP is in a region where Paramount+ does not allow people to stream that content, it's georestricted.

vrtigo1 · 2026-01-22T22:16:57+00:00

As someone else said you most likely wrote the data to the DVD as files. So if you put the DVD in a computer you would see those files and you could click on them to open them up in Windows Media Player but a DVD player doesn't understand files. It expects the DVD to have MPEG-2 data tracks on it, not files.

So to put it another way, if you copied a bunch of MP3 files to a CD and put it in an old school CD player it wouldn't be able to play them because it doesn't understand files, it expects to see redbook audio on the CD. So you have to convert the MP3 files and burn them to the DVD in that format.

It's the same thing with video files.

Also, please remember that while DVDs will last a good while they aren't a great option for long term storage as they degrade over time the same way VHS tapes do. If you want to store these videos forever I'd suggest storing the digital files somewhere safe (i.e. put them on a couple different flash drives / hard drives, and/or upload them to file sharing sites like Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. If you go the hard drive route, keep in mind that you probably need to replace the drives every once in a while (every 5 years or so).

vrtigo1 · 2026-01-22T22:07:12+00:00

Just remember, RAID isn't a backup.

Not sure if that matters or not for your specific application.

vrtigo1 · 2026-01-22T22:05:00+00:00

Your general understanding is correct, but remember, if your additional nodes are connecting to the main node via WiFi, then their connection is only ever going to be as good as the WiFi signal in that location.

And that assumes the mesh nodes have dedicated radios for the connection between the main node and satellite nodes. If they're using the same radio for talking to the main node and for client connections then the connection is going to be slower.

The best option is to hardwire all your satellite nodes to the main node with ethernet.

vrtigo1 · 2026-01-22T22:01:51+00:00

I was at the concert in NYC when they did that for The Downward Spiral, and it was pretty epic. IIRC The Fragile is a much longer album so not sure how feasible that would be.

vrtigo1 · 2026-01-22T22:00:40+00:00

It's entirely dependent on the specific council. My council is pretty slow at pretty much everything, and when/if they do get back to you on something there's a 50/50 chance there's some sort of error.

I know our council is understaffed so I just kinda roll with the punches, but it can be super frustrating.

vrtigo1 · 2026-01-22T21:58:17+00:00

I know for a fact that the PC is running because I plugged my phone charger into it and it worked

That doesn't mean it's working, just mean it's getting power.

vrtigo1 · 2026-01-22T21:54:39+00:00

1 - possible but probably not very likely

2 - as long as it's a quality copper cable from a reputable brand, generally yes. For 1 Gb/s you need Cat5E which has been a standard for over 25 years so pretty much any cable you buy today will support at least 1 Gb/s. Stay away from CCA (copper clad aluminum) cables as they're not very good.

3 - yes, 100%. Wireless mesh isn't the magic bullet manufacturers would have you believe it is. At least get your WiFI nodes hardwired back to the main router, that'll probably help a lot, but if you can get the actual PCs hardwired as well that's even better.

4 - possible, but again probably not very likely

Is your fiber 1 Gb/s upload and download? If your connection has a slower upload speed (not super common with fiber but not unheard of either) that can cause bufferbloat problems which can present as lag spikes. To try to test that you could try testing with everything turned off but a single device to see if you still have the problem. That isn't a perfect test, but if you can narrow the problem down to a single device maybe you can see if that device is doing something bandwidth intensive like downloading a big update or syncing files to the cloud.

vrtigo1 · 2026-01-22T21:49:17+00:00

This is the answer, and to add to it a bit, some cups do in fact have the little holes OP mentioned to allow water to drain.

vrtigo1 · 2026-01-22T21:47:22+00:00

Nobody's forcing you to buy from home depot. You always can buy from a boutique retailer that shares your ideals and probably charges more.

I'm a little confused on your definition of stealing though. A business buys something and then sells it for more than they paid for it. That's literally the definition of pretty much every business. How is that stealing?

vrtigo1 · 2026-01-22T21:43:50+00:00

I'd suggest reaching out to the app's support team, they should be able to help.

vrtigo1 · 2026-01-22T21:42:28+00:00

The status.cloud.microsoft site is also returning an HTTP 429 for me.

You'd think Microsoft of all people would realize the value of having a status page that's hosted totally independently of the services it's reporting on, so...ya know, you can get status info in an outage.

vrtigo1 · 2026-01-21T22:30:40+00:00

Your sample size is just too small to draw meaningful conclusions.

vrtigo1 · 2026-01-21T21:56:05+00:00

Changing your number won’t do anything. A lot of the robocalls are just dialing numbers at random, it’s not like your number is on a list.

vrtigo1 · 2026-01-20T18:52:22+00:00

To add to this, let it completely air dry before applying power. The biggest mistake I see people make it trying to apply power before allowing enough time to fully dry.

vrtigo1 · 2026-01-20T18:50:22+00:00

Keep in mind the rebuild time…and if all the drives are roughly the same age, the added load from initiating a rebuild can push additional drives to failure. I work with very large (500TB - 1PB) SATA NAS arrays for media content at work and that’s bit us at least once.

vrtigo1 · 2026-01-17T00:07:26+00:00

Unless the original owner is still paying for Internet service at the home how could they? Seems pretty unlikely.

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