This week, I’ve been assisting our mission team in Haiti with networking upgrades for the Guest House. I really wanted to go on this trip, but there’s way too much going on back at Resurrection. So I get to do my part through the magic of the Internet.

With the help of Liz and Bryon on the ground, as well as Thomas, our local IT guy there, we got remote management enabled on the Sonicwall, and from there I was able to reconfigure it for Dynamic DNS, WAN failover to the satellite when the WiMax link goes out.

The following day, I got word from the team that the failover works like a champ and that performance is much improved. Now we have a static IP on the WiMax link, so we can remote into the device when our teams aren’t there.

The other piece that needed to happen was to secure the wireless so that folks in the neighbourhood can’t mooch the limited bandwidth at the guest house. We tried to do WPA, but realized afterward that you can’t do WDS and WPA on a Ubiquiti radio because the MAC addresses are encrypted in WPA. Going to have to fall back to WEP. Key management isn’t nearly as easy with WEP, but it is what it is. Maybe Ubiquiti isn’t the solution here. That will be for a future team to figure out.