Ninux.org Wireless Community

Le nostre aspettative di crescita di almeno un nodo al mese per dicembre 2010 sono state ampiamente raggiunte.

Questo mese abbiamo già montato 5 nuovi nodi nella zona di San Giovanni. Il primo link tra Nino ed Edoardo poi Mara e Raffaele ed infine il link con il Sans Papiers.

Quest’ultimo è uno spazio sociale dove la rete Ninux ha avuto anche l’effetto di portare la connessione ad Internet, li dove prima invece c’era Digital Divide. Un problema bello grosso quello di stare offline, quando si ospita nella propria struttura una radio web come RadioSonar. Proprio Radio Sonar ci ha contattato per risolvere questo enorme problema di connettività.

Abbiamo posizionato la nostra NanoStation 5 con OpenWRT Backfire 10.3.1 RC4 sul tetto del palazzo. Non è stato difficile collegarci al resto della nostra rete, ed in poche ore avevamo già finito il nostro lavoro sul tetto. Siamo stati fortunati perché abbiamo trovato una presa di corrente direttamente sul tetto del palazzo, ed è stato veloce fare le prove.

Siamo poi passati nei sotterranei per finire il lavoro, e montare un AP per la distribuzione della connessione ad Internet agli utenti finali della struttura. Vediamo nella foto un paio di simpatici ragazzi di Ninux alla presa con le crimpatrice per gli RJ-45, non è facile usarla quando sei daltonico ! 🙂

Speriamo di comunicare presto tramite il nostro blog l’installazione di altri nuovi nodi ! 🙂

Just back from Berlin, where I went with my Ninux friends at the Wireless Community Weekend 2010. As always a lot of interesting news and it is good to see old friends involved in Wireless Community Networks in other cities and countries.

It was 8 Italian Ninux guys, 7 from Rome and 1 from Pisa. Yeah, this year Ninux is spreading country-wide. The students from Eigenlab with the strong tech help of Gioacchino are starting a new Ninux network in the city of Pisa.

This trip as you can imagine, was a lot about nerds and programming/installing/debugging software firmwares and so on … but not only…. Anyway here the picture of the arrival at C-Base, computer+beer

As my friends know I’m also a fun of riding bicycles in the cities as an alternative to cars, and Berlin is a way ahead of Rome in this direction. I’ve seen several fixies around but also cool German bikes not easy to find in Rome. Here in the picture some nice bike I’ve seen parked around

We also had a lot of typical German food, especially Berliner beer, club-mate and Doner Kebab. Nerds diet consists in eating a lot of food regardless of time and space, so whenever hungry the nerds quit of all the activities to go finding food In C-Base this was easy because the legendary Freifunk Barbeque was on 24/7, and it was possible to go there at any time and cook something.

Talking about some mesh tech, I spent most of the time with Mitar installing the Nodewatcher developed in Ljubljana (Slovenia) on the Ninux network. It is really a great software and I’m already looking and to graphs generated for the Ninux nodes. The system gives you a lot of precious information to debug/monitor the network. The work together was very productive and Mitar opened a lot of tickets on his Trac, because this was actually the first installation on another network.

Also the meeting solved some nasty bug of OLSR with IPv6 that Gioacchino reported to the OLSR team.

Me and Claudio had a meeting with Kloschi to brainstorm a bit about the Radiomate project, that is starting in a few days. Some very useful thoughts came out of the discussion and I just can’t wait to see the results !

Well next nerd event is soon ! Even if time every time in Berlin flies away so quickly, I’m happy anyways, because I’m meeting many of my German friends again in Bracciano for the BattleMesh !

Saverio

Hello all,

so we have a cool name for the Web Radio Programme Scheduler Project that kloschi picked up: “radiomate” 🙂

Last monday we met at Fusolab for a startup brainstorming meeting. It was me Claudio and Dario (his mentor).
We started from what we wrote before on our wiki page.

The key idea is to develop and package a software/system to give out to people that want to run a webradio.

The package will contain a complete system:
* Website
* Programme Scheduler + Icecast

Usually web radios (as you can see from liquidsoap examples) are just about playlists and some live shows.

We have some more complex scenario at Fusoradio because we have people transmitting from home and actively booking the time slot in the programme schedule to start their transmission.
We have in mind a web radio where the listeners may hear a pre-recorded transmission that a Web Deejay (WJ) loads in the system with a mp3 file, or the listener may hear a live transmission. If there is no content to play, neither live or pre-recorded, the fallback should choose a random podcast to play.

Regarding the front-end to the listeners and the WJs, the web site must have these features:
* Writes on a DB that gives to the scheduler information on the on
going transmission
* upload of mp3 with pre-recorderd radio transmissions
* manage time slots booking for WJs to transmit
* manages podcasting for listening old transmissions

A strong requirement is that each transmission has some extra content/description on the web site, like a flyer, a description and so on.

We should agree on a CMS to start from, and develop custom plugins and themes.
There is still a on going discussion on this 🙂

The CMS will have to handle different types of users, administrators, WJs etc etc.
Admins for example will be able to alter the programme scheduler without restrictions, while the WJ are only able to book time slots from 30 to 90 minutes.
For live shows a user should be able to be temporarily unlocked to start an audio flow immediately, without waiting for a time slot.

Technically about the program scheduler:
We understood that we have to write some logic in python/lua. This logic has a “telnet” interface to liquid soap, where there is a finite state system that is triggered from the external logic. So the python/lua handles the db interaction, and moves the state of the liquidsoap program.

The whole picture:
The WJ transmit from home via Internet, their shouldcast protocol media stream is received by liquidsoap as a input.harbor source. The liquidsoap core will be ready to accept that input because of its state machine controlled by the database, that has been previously setup with the help of the web site. The liquidsap bounces the output stream to a icecast server, where the listeners are connecting to listen the web radio.

This is about all, we started a mailing list with the people from the community actively working in this project. Me and Claudio will be in Berlin at WCW2010 to discuss live with our other Freifunk friends.

Saverio

Anche per l’edizione 2010 Ninux sarà presente al Security Unicam Dates organizzata a Camerino dal CameLUG. Due giorni dedicati alla sicurezza informatica, il software libero e non solo… infatti saremo proprio noi da Roma a fare la trasferta insieme ai lockpickers. Il gruppo Ninux porterà ben due talks, uno romano ed uno pisano, in quanto la nostra rete si sta espandendo su tutta la penisola.

Tutte le informazioni sull’evento sono pubblicate sul sito web del CameLUG.

In attesa di raccontarvi come andrà l’evento 2010 vi lasciamo con il video dello scorso anno !

Saverio

Camerino Security Date 8-9 Maggio 2009 from Saverio Proto on Vimeo.

Saverio

Yesterday we had the official notification to the accepted students for the Google Summer Of Code (GSoC) 2010. Ninux participated into the Freifunk umbrella organization for the year 2010. After the positive experience of the last year we actively participated into the program, having some of our members as mentor, and proposing project ideas.

We have three Ninux students accepted for GSoC projects:

• Claudio Pisa, working on the Web Radio Programme scheduler
• Marco Bonola, working on the IP/UDP Encapsulation Kernel Module
• Stefano Pilla, working on the Database Output for Freimap

We are going to keep this blog updated with news about GSoC, development progress and so on. Also the Ninux SVN repository will be the main source of development snapshots for people interested in following the progress of our code.

The date to begin coding is May 24th, but we are having our GSoC meetup for Freifunk students in Berlin during the Wireless Community Weekend 2010 where Ninux students will talk about their projects ! We just can’t wait to be there ! 😀

Saverio