Volunteer IT work during COVID-19 period- Wireless Network Setup & System configuration at Children's Specialized Hospital, Peradeniya, Sri Lanka

The system that I developed and installed in 2017 to Echo Cardio Clinic of Children's Hospital, Peradeniya, Sri Lanka is running smoothly without any issue continuously for 5 years.

Zero maintenance cost with Zero breakdown until today. I used to go over there every 6 months to get a Database Backup.

Only issue that they were having was a wired network and that became worse during the COVID-19 pandemic. They had to re-arrange the clinic and separate the workstations into many locations. Network wires were lying everywhere and having issue with walking. Its like lot of traps on the ground.

Dr. Mrs. Sunetha Irugalbandara, who is the head of the Cardio Ward and clinic, asked me to help out with the situation. Then we decided to go with wireless network.

They bough TPLink USB WiFi dongles and Mr. Bandula, owner of

, donated the wireless Router to get it done.

When all the dongles are tested and configured the wireless router, I went in to the Clinic premises on Sunday evening to make it at once.

First I removed and packed all the network cables which were on the floor.

Then isolated the Clinic network from the Hospital common network and configured the server (Ubuntu 14.04 LTS) with the new router settings.

Afterwards configured each workstation and printer server with TPLink USB WiFi Dongle and also added the host entry into each workstation so that they do not need to type the IP address of the server to access the system.

Only one machine came up with access issues to the printer server and had to deal with spending 30 minutes.

Spent 3 hours to configure and test on each workstation by accessing the system and printing cardio report.

HAPPY ! HAPPY !! HAPPY !!!

Informed Dr. Mrs. Sunethra Irugalbandara and left the premises by handing over the document which is having all the configuration details of the network to the doctor in-charge.

So that, in case of issue, they can get somebody else to fix it.

Got a official appreciation letter form the Clinic after 2 weeks.

Thinking of doing some automation project to the Clinic with Arduino and planning that with my Son for it.