Wireless adapter and hostapd drivers suggestion

Support Hardware
1

We are using Tenda adapters with hostapd on ubuntu for 60 students. But now, those Tenda adapters are out of production. Please suggest wireless adapter and hostapd drivers so we can try it at our end.

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Hi @Swapnil_Chaudhari

Good question!

Can you add some more info about the setup? What device will the adapter be connected to?

The adapter you’re looking for is USB, right? What will it be connected to?

60 is a very high number of clients to put on a USB adapter. Did it work well?

Have you looked on Ebay or similar to see if there are some surplus stocks for sale?

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Laptop as a server : Acer One 14 Z476
Operating System : Ubuntu 14.04

Hotspot Info :

  1. Hostapd v1.0 (Driver : nl80211)used to create hotspot on ubuntu.
  2. USB wireless adapter : Tenda W322U (out of production) Note: Looking for new USB adapter which can support 60 tablets.

60 is a very high number of clients to put on a USB adapter. Did it work well?
Answer : Yes, It is working fine with 60 users.

Have you looked on Ebay or similar to see if there are some surplus stocks for sale?
Answer : We checked but did not find any.

Please suggest us USB wireless adaper which can support 60 users. Your help is appreciated.

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Hi, may be I cannot help , but the problem is interesting,: it exist many usb WiFi adapter and hostapd support many of them, why not use another USB adapter?
We are looking for another solution:
We try to install rachel kolibri on pi zero even for server side, wireless is already integrated, but 60 users will be to much. The next step could be clusyering with docker kubernetes. We are testing this way and any help is appreciated too

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@luglimbe

Not sure how Kubernetes clusters would work, but it sounds complicated :slight_smile: I would like to just add that Kolibri has been built to assume that it is distributed.

Good key questions are: Where are the bottlenecks?

  • Access point load: Get a better or more access points
  • Access point reach: Get more access points placed in different physical locations and on different channels
  • Kolibri CPU load:
    • Get a larger server for Kolibri
    • Install more devices on the same network and have students access differentiated installations (http://kolibri-server1 and http://kolibri-server2)
    • Install more devices and give each device an access point, letting either the access point’s SSID or channel decide the load balancing
  • Kolibri i/o load: Get a faster external storage device or mount storage via ethernet LAN

We are working on a solution to have Kolibri utilize several cores via an application server (uWSGI). For instance, Raspberry Pi has 4 cores, and we only use one of them. This will improve performance a lot.

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