I am currently working with Kolibri in Tunja, Colombia. I am using Raspberry Pis as servers and found out that they only support a max of 5 clients using the wifi card. We have connected a router to the Pi to make it work better as a wi-fi server.
So, I have two questions:
Is it possible to make the Raspberry Pi a better wi-fi server? Having the channels in an external SSD will make it faster to navigate, or more clients might connect?
Is there a way to use a Raspberry Pi 4 work as Kolibri lan server for 25 computers?
I would be happy to learn about server design in other parts of the world. For example, how other organizations have created a solid wi-fi network for the use of Kolibri? What is the best hardware setup?
I am new to to the Kolibri forum, but I happened to see your post. I am also interested in RPi’s and I remembered that I read something about setting up a network with 3 routers but no switch (hub) for connecting 30 clients. Here is the link to that document: Kolibri Implementation Pack - Google Drive
Thanks @Marius for sharing that link!! Definitely a great example from Kenya to look at for setting up multiple routers to support a higher number of users (thanks @Mwangangi!).
We also have a hardware guide which details average concurrent capacity for different server types (p.21), and for RPi have heard reports that the max number is ~20. We also recommend using the Kolibri server package as this will help with performance and supporting concurrent users on the higher end of this range.
If you do test out the RPi, we’d love to hear your feedback on the max number of devices you’re able to support. We don’t have concrete testing yet on the RPi 4 so it would be great to learn from your experience.
We have connected a Tp_Link router to the RPi 4 2 Gb and we can connect ~30 clients to the server, all browsing channels and using the server simultaneously.
With Kolibri-server recent tests have shown support for up to 85 devices simultaneously with the three routers. You can vary the number of routers depending on your users. I like putting it up to a maximum as I don’t have control of how many users I can have at a time. I have been testing the below hardware as well
If yes; do you use an external SSD for the channels in the setup, or only the MicroSD card? I ask this because it seems to me that the speed of a MicroSD card might be a problem to allow many clients browsing different channels simultaneously.
Hello, the Mini-pc you see in my post has internal storage of up to 32 GB, but has a slot for an SD card. That is what we tested using the internal memory not the sd card. Not a Raspberry Pi. Alternatively you can invest on a fast external disk and configure Kolibri to connect to it. Let me know if you have any other questions. Thank you
