Ninux.org Wireless Community

Hello World !

this weekend for the first time I partecipated to a Battle of the Mesh, an event organized periodically to test routing protocol implementations for mesh networks.

First of all I have to thank a lot Benjamin Henrion for the great hospitality !! He hosted us the all weekend and we really felt like at home !

There were about 15 people at Okno coming from all across Europe to experiment together for a weekend. Activities were organized with a wiki page, that now contains a lot of useful information.

I went with Claudio. We have been identified as the olsrd team, even if we are not real core developers but we just contributed to the project with a couple of plugins. However, we successfully worked on olsrd, and with the help of Szczepan Jany we found a bug in the current stable version that was fixed right away by the real olsrd developers that were following our progress online.

Another good thing about the event is that I got much more familiar with the OpenWRT toolchain insights, and with the UCI interface to push settings into the router.

What was really impressive was the big amout of hardware available! We had countless Foneras on our desk and also many other wireless devices !! Nicolas Thill developed a set of scripts to configure in batch multiple devices. The key idea was to compile a firmware with an embedded public ssh key, so that automated scripts could push UCI settings into the devices. To loop between the devices a list of MAC addresses is passed to the script that hacks the ARP cache to jump from one device to another… of course all this is documented on the wiki

The only thing that was bad to me was the terrible cold I got on Saturday, that made me feel like a zombie for the all day I have to say I enjoyed much more Friday and Sunday !! Hopefully Pieter healed me on Saturday night with some “Rum & Honey” Belgian medicine

More pictures of the event have been published here.

I hope to see many people present at the Battle of the Mesh very soon in Rome for the Ninux Day !

Saverio

Saluti a tutti da Bruxelles,

sarà un mese che non scrivo sul blog, ma tra biciclette computers e matrimoni nerd sono stato parecchio impegnato

come dicevo oggi sono a Bruxelles dove resterò un weekend per la seconda edizione del Battle Of the Mesh insieme a Clauz. Siamo ospiti a Okno, un associazione in stile Fusolab, che per questi giorni si è trasformata in un vero e proprio laboratorio nerd. Siamo una decina di smanettoni wireless, alcuni da i development team dei protocolli di routing per reti mesh. Per ora stiamo flashando una tonnellata di Fonere e ricaricando dei pacchi batterie, in quanto domani andremo in giro per la città a posizionare queste antenne portatili per i nostri esperimenti.

I risultati già non mancano, infatti facendo qualche prova l’amico Szczepan ha trovato un insidioso bug di OLSR che per fortuna l’OLSR team ha prontamente risolto con una patch di emergenza

Per ora da Bruxelles è tutto, speriamo di pubblicare qualche risultato significativo domenica sera !

Saverio