Ninux.org Wireless Community

As (many of) you can read from our blog(s) [-1][0][1][2][3], in March many ninux.org folks from Pisa, Rome and Sicily went to Catalunya for the Battlemesh v4. It was a great event, where we met our friends from all around Europe and had a lot of fun!

You can get an idea of the mood of the event from this video masterpiece from ZioPRoTo!

Enjoy and hope to see you all at the next Battlemesh!

Wireless Battle Mesh V4 from Saverio Proto on Vimeo.

Su Internet Magazine di settembre è uscito un articolo sul Wireless Battle of the Mesh v3! Il pdf si può scaricare da qui.

Clauz

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

I’m so sorry I was totally busy and I hadn’t time yet to blog about the Ninux Day !!! So it is now time to write something !

It was our first Ninux Day, and it was great !

Every started Thursday night. Many of our international guests were already here in Rome, so we had a Warm up Party at Fusolab.

The following morning I went to Defrag_ to open up the place around 10.00, because the first people were expected by 12.00. Thanks to Andrea we had some beautiful posters at the entrance, as you can see in the picture.

Friday was quite a busy day. We had  many interesting talks, and people started to know each other. Only on the first day we had more than 50 people attending, and many were coming from abroad. On Sunday we had registered 123 people !

The first talk started a bit late, Ulf was the first one to have his slides ready, so I sent him on stage He started an interesting talk on how to manage cameras with embedded devices running OpenWRT and gphoto. The goal was to use the embedded devices to make panoramic pictures. Friday talks were on many different topics. After Ulf we had Alexander List talking about the Open Spectrum. After a while the “use the wiki” signs we had put everywhere at Defrag_ started to work… the hackers were self managing the event their self, timetable was optimized, talks were shaped to the avaiable timeslots… it is always cool to see how the hacker society can self manage an event

To help the people know each other we organized a permanent PGP Signing Party. Most of us exchange emails during the year, very often attaching patches and snippets of code. It is a good thing to make sure about the identity of the person who is writing to you. So the key signing had begin ! After a while people were interacting together, coding, discussing about protocol, showing their work to others.

The long Ninux Day continued for the all weekend until Sunday in the late afternoon. For the first time I have seen people from wireless communities from all Europe actually working together and exchanging ideas. I was very very happy about the result, even if organizing everything I missed many details on the presentation and works that were going on ! But it was ok! I just can’t do too many things at the same time

The very good thing about this event is that now people are still discussing and working on the ideas and projects developed in the weekend in Rome. On the Ninux Day mailing list and on the nodedb-interop list you will find community members from all europe actively working.

Well, it is too had to describe the Ninux Day in such a short blog post, so if this year you have missed it, I suggest it is much better to come next year and see with your eyes !

Happy hacking !

Saverio

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