[ArborMesh] Arbormesh Hackathon: What needs doing?

[Alexander Honkala]

Having the clinic at the beginning of the hackathon would be ideal. Then the
info is all fresh and immediately applicable.

There is a lot of talk here about modifying existing protocols to work for
us. Are there any packages out there already that do *most* of what we want
that we can implement more off-shelf and *then* modify as needed? Strikes me
that we are sort of front-loading the development cycle before having
test/implementation data.

Just my $0.02.

-X

On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 10:10 PM, Ryan Hughes <ryan at iheartryan.com> wrote:

> Hi.  So I wanted to get the ball rolling on the discussion of what should
> happen at the ArborMesh hackathon, Friday, May 6.
>
> We could use a website!  Also, artwork, logo, and so forth!
>
> There are things to be done on the firmware.
>
> I got openwrt configured to speak OLSR and Batman-adv, both.  It uses two
> different network prefixes (one for each protocol).  I was wanting to do
> that so we could do tests/upgrades on one routing protocol while the other
> makes the actual network happen.  That sort of thing.
>
> One thing that olsr does that batman-adv does not is this:  It detects
> whether the router has access to the internet.  If it does, it reports
> itself as a gateway.  It periodically pings a set of hard-coded addresses to
> test whether it can get to the internet.
>
> I'd like us to implement a cron script that would do the equivalent for
> batman.
>
> Perhaps, before the hackathon, we should have a little "clinic" on how to
> work with openwrt, and a more in-depth technical introduction to the routing
> protocols.  I can show you what I've been doing, and we can get y'all up to
> speed.  If anybody would like to attend such a "clinic", tell me and we can
> arrange a time.
>
> We could also do this type of thing at the hackathon itself.  I just
> thought that if anybody wanted a pre-introduction, they could do a little
> tinkering before we got there, and then we could get more work done at the
> hackathon.
>
> I'm gonna try to convert what I've been doing into an "OpenWRT ImageBuilder
> script".  Right now, I've got a .config file and so forth, so you need a
> full OpenWRT source tree.  But an imagebuilder script is a little easier to
> share and faster to produce.
>
>
> Now, in addition to the router firmware, we will probably want a web-app
> that can do some of the central management tasks.  I was thinking we'd use
> "Nodewatcher" for this purpose.  The central management tasks include such
> things as assigning IP addresses and showing a cool map with our nodes and
> connections, to brag.  Nodewatcher is a django app.
>        http://dev.wlan-si.net/wiki/Podrobnosti/Nodewatcher
>
> Here's a live sample of nodewatcher being run on wlan-slovenia.
>        https://nodes.wlan-si.net/
>
> Nodewatcher needs to be installed and configured for us, but it's also a
> pretty new software project.  Only recently has it gained the ability to
> operate outside of wlan-slovenia.  We will almost certainly have to add
> features.
>
>
> Also, we will probably want to add some stuff to the web-UI that's on each
> router.  This would be done in OpenWRT's "LuCI" environment.  LuCI is a
> web-app framework written in lua that runs on each router.
>
> Some of the things to add:  Maybe some kind of "configuration wizard", like
> what Freifunk has.
>        http://wiki.freifunk.net/Freifunk_Firmware_%28English%29
>
> Also, there is already a luci app to show a visualization of the olsr
> topology, but I don't think there are any luci apps to deal with batman at
> all.  It'd be nice if we could start one -- at least as a topology
> visualizer, but also to see other status information and do some
> configuration, maybe.
>
>
> Also, it'd be sweet if we had one of those "welcome screens".  Like, when
> you first log into the network and it's like "You are about to use
> ArborMesh.  Plz to agree to our policies."  There are openwrt packages ready
> to use, but we'd have to configure them, and put our own artwork and info
> inthere.
> But this would also be cool if we could use that space to advertise
> hyperlocal things, like "You are about to use arbormesh.  Here's a cool irc
> channel and mailing list.  Y'know what's cool?  AHA.  And other community
> organizations and stuff.  Oh, and look:  These are some network services
> being run on the inside of the network!  Check out this website without even
> going down to the copper at all!".
>
> We could come up with some sort of broadcast mechanism that we could use to
> push out changes to the welcome page.
>
>
> This is my brainstorm.  Anybody else got any ideas?  List 'em, here.  When
> we get to the hackathon, we can prioritize.
> --Ryan
> _______________________________________________
> ArborMesh mailing list
> ArborMesh at iheartryan.com
> https://iheartryan.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/arbormesh
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://iheartryan.com/pipermail/arbormesh/attachments/20110420/c5ca0995/attachment.htm>