The 4 year old router Central purchased is starting to get a bit flaky.  The hardware of the router is actually pretty good, but the firmware has always been terrible (and never updated).  As the demands of our network have gotten more and more, the bugginess of the firmware has popped up more and more.  Finally, this week it’s become all but useless and it keeps dropping our iOS devices from the network.  I have a feeling that the router doesn’t like devices which go to sleep and wake up trying to reconnect to the network (our AppleTV has the same problem).  After months of tweaking the settings to try and fix the issue, I’m tired of the growing drops.   It can’t be wiped to put dd-wrt on it (otherwise I wouldn’t have needed to upgrade) so, we just ordered an upgrade for ourselves.

This leaves the orphaned Buffalo router without a job. I think if I do a reset to default settings and keep the network load light it still might be a useful tool, and I believe I’ve got a job that might fit the bill – a “worship network.”

At Central we’ve been playing with QR codes to pass on information to the congregation.  We started with the worship bulletin and announcements, and have added lyrics to the mix (thanks to OpenLP 2.0).  It’s worked well, but I’ve been looking for a better solution.  The QR codes our web site work great for smart-phones, but if someone comes in with a wifi only device we need to give out the network key so people can access the network.  This diminishes its usefulness (not to mention the security issues).

As a solution, I can set up the Buffalo to create an unencrypted network over in the building on Sunday mornings and set up a local web server on my Mac (or the office Mac).  On this server we can create a local web-site which has our Bulletin, Announcements, links to sign ups for special events, and added materials for worship – lyrics, background information for the day’s Scripture readings, and even stories about the congregation, and explanations of the worship space.  This would all be local only, so the information would need to be mirrored on our web-site, but it would be quite useful for people who have wifi devices without needing to give out an encryption password or going through the pain of setting up a guest network.  It’s an idea, anyway.