- <title>A Raspberry Pi based batman-adv Mesh network node</title>
- <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Raspberry_Pi_based_batman_adv_Mesh_network_node.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Mon, 21 Oct 2013 11:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
- <description><p>The last few days I have been experimenting with
-<a href="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki">the
-batman-adv mesh technology</a>. I want to gain some experience to see
-if it will fit <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the
-Freedombox project</a>, and together with my neighbors try to build a
-mesh network around the park where I live. Batman-adv is a layer 2
-mesh system ("ethernet" in other words), where the mesh network appear
-as if all the mesh clients are connected to the same switch.</p>
-
-<p>My hardware of choice was the Linksys WRT54GL routers I had lying
-around, but I've been unable to get them working with batman-adv. So
-instead, I started playing with a
-<a href="http://www.raspberrypi.org/">Raspberry Pi</a>, and tried to
-get it working as a mesh node. My idea is to use it to create a mesh
-node which function as a switch port, where everything connected to
-the Raspberry Pi ethernet plug is connected (bridged) to the mesh
-network. This allow me to hook a wifi base station like the Linksys
-WRT54GL to the mesh by plugging it into a Raspberry Pi, and allow
-non-mesh clients to hook up to the mesh. This in turn is useful for
-Android phones using <a href="http://servalproject.org/">the Serval
-Project</a> voip client, allowing every one around the playground to
-phone and message each other for free. The reason is that Android
-phones do not see ad-hoc wifi networks (they are filtered away from
-the GUI view), and can not join the mesh without being rooted. But if
-they are connected using a normal wifi base station, they can talk to
-every client on the local network.</p>
-
-<p>To get this working, I've created a debian package
-<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node">meshfx-node</a>
-and a script
-<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/blob/master/build-rpi-mesh-node">build-rpi-mesh-node</a>
-to create the Raspberry Pi boot image. I'm using Debian Jessie (and
-not Raspbian), to get more control over the packages available.
-Unfortunately a huge binary blob need to be inserted into the boot
-image to get it booting, but I'll ignore that for now. Also, as
-Debian lack support for the CPU features available in the Raspberry
-Pi, the system do not use the hardware floating point unit. I hope
-the routing performance isn't affected by the lack of hardware FPU
-support.</p>
-
-<p>To create an image, run the following with a sudo enabled user
-after inserting the target SD card into the build machine:</p>
-
-<p><pre>
-% wget -O build-rpi-mesh-node \
- https://raw.github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/master/build-rpi-mesh-node
-% sudo bash -x ./build-rpi-mesh-node > build.log 2>&1
-% dd if=/root/rpi/rpi_basic_jessie_$(date +%Y%m%d).img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M
-%
-</pre></p>
-
-<p>Booting with the resulting SD card on a Raspberry PI with a USB
-wifi card inserted should give you a mesh node. At least it does for
-me with a the wifi card I am using. The default mesh settings are the
-ones used by the Oslo mesh project at Hackeriet, as I mentioned in
-<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html">an
-earlier blog post about this mesh testing</a>.</p>
-
-<p>The mesh node was not horribly expensive either. I bought
-everything over the counter in shops nearby. If I had ordered online
-from the lowest bidder, the price should be significantly lower:</p>
-
-<p><table>
-
-<tr><th>Supplier</th><th>Model</th><th>NOK</th></tr>
-<tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi model B</td><td>349.90</td></tr>
-<tr><td>Teknikkmagasinet</td><td>Raspberry Pi type B case</td><td>99.90</td></tr>
-<tr><td>Lefdal</td><td>Jensen Air:Link 25150</td><td>295.-</td></tr>
-<tr><td>Clas Ohlson</td><td>Kingston 16 GB SD card</td><td>199.-</td></tr>
-<tr><td>Total cost</td><td></td><td>943.80</td></tr>
-
-</table></p>
-
-<p>Now my mesh network at home consist of one laptop in the basement
-connected to my production network, one Raspberry Pi node on the 1th
-floor that can be seen by my neighbor across the park, and one
-play-node I use to develop the image building script. And some times
-I hook up my work horse laptop to the mesh to test it. I look forward
-to figuring out what kind of latency the batman-adv setup will give,
-and how much packet loss we will experience around the park. :)</p>
+ <title>Debian Edu interview: Dominik George</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Dominik_George.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Dominik_George.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Wed, 25 Dec 2013 13:40:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
+project</a> consist of both newcomers and old timers, and this time I
+was able to get an interview with a newcomer in the project who showed
+up on the IRC channel a few weeks ago to let us know about his
+successful installation of Debian Edu Wheezy in his School. Say hello
+to <a href="https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/Natureshadow">Dominik
+George</a>.</p>
+
+<!-- http://www.dominik-george.de/images/foto.jpg -->
+
+<p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
+
+<p>I am a 23 year-old student from Germany who has spent half of his
+life with open source. In "real life", I am, as already mentioned, a
+student in the fields of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering,
+Information Technologies and Anglistics. Due to my (only partially
+voluntary) huge engagement in the open source world, these things are
+a bit vacant right now however.</p>
+
+<p>I also have been working as a project teacher at a Gymasnium
+(public school) for various years now. I took up that work some time
+around 2005 when still attending that school myself and have continued
+it until today. I also had been running the (kind of very advanced)
+network of that school together with a team of very interested and
+talented students in the age of 11 to 15 years, who took the chance to
+learn a lot about open source and networking before I left the school
+to help building another school's informational education concept from
+scratch.</p>
+
+<p>That said, one might see me as a kind of "glue" between school kids
+and the elderly of teachers as well as between the open source
+ecosystem and the (even more complex) educational ecosystem.</p>
+
+<p>When I am not busy with open source or education, I like Geocaching
+and cycling.</p>
+
+<p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
+project?</strong></p>
+
+<p>I think that happened some time around 2009 when I first attended
+<a href="http://www.froscon.org">FrOSCon</a> and visited the project
+booth. I think I wasn't too interested back then because I used to
+have an attitude of disliking software that does too much stuff on its
+own. Maybe I was too inexperienced to realise the upsides of an
+"out-of-the-box" solution ;).</p>
+
+<p>The first time I actively talked to Skolelinux people was at
+<a href="http://www.openrheinruhr.de">OpenRheinRuhr</a> 2011 when the
+BiscuIT project, a home-grewn software used by my school for various
+really cool things from timetables and class contact lists to lunch
+ordering, student ID card printing and project elections first got to
+a stage where it could have been published. I asked the Skolelinux
+guys running the booth if the project were interested in it and gave a
+small demonstration, but there wasn't any real feedback and the guys
+seemed rather uninterested.</p>
+
+<p>After I left the school where I developed the software, it got
+mostly lost, but I am now reimplementing it for my new school. I have
+reusability and compatibility in mind, and I hop there will be a new
+basis for contributing it to the Skolelinux project ;)!</p>
+
+<p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
+Edu?</strong></p>
+
+<p>The most important advantage seems to be that it "just
+works". After overcoming some minor (but still very annoying) glitches
+in the installer, I got a fully functional, working school network,
+without the month-long hassle I experienced when setting all that up
+from scratch in earlier years. And above that, it rocked - I didn't
+have any real hardware at hand, because the school was just founded
+and has no money whatsoever, so I installed a combined server (main
+server, terminal services and workstation) in a VM on my personal
+notebook, bridging the LTSP network interface to the ethernet port,
+and then PXE-booted the Windows notebooks that were lying around from
+it. I could use 8 clients without any performance issues, by using a
+tiny little VM on a tiny little notebook. I think that's enough to say
+that it rocks!</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, there are marketing reasons. Life's bad, and so no
+politician will ever permit a setup described as "Debian, an universal
+operating system, with some really cool educational tools" while they
+will be jsut fine with "Skolelinux, a single-purpose solution for your
+school network", even if both turn out to be the very same thing (yes,
+this is unfair towards the Skolelinux project, and must not be taken
+too seriously - you get the idea, anyway).</p>
+
+<p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
+Edu?</strong></p>
+
+<p>I have not been involved with Skolelinux long enough to really
+answer this question in a fair way. Thus, please allow me to put it in
+other words: "What do you expect from Skolelinux to keep liking it?" I
+can list a few points about that:</p>
+
+<ul>
+
+ <li>always strive to get all things integrated into Debian upstream
+ <li>be open to discussion about changes and the like, even with newcomers
+ <li>be helpful at being helpful ;)
+
+</ul>
+
+<p>I'm really sorry I cannot say much more about that :(!</p>
+
+<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
+
+<p>First of all, all software I use is free and open. I have abandoned
+all non-free software (except for firmware on my darned phone) this
+year.</p>
+
+<p>I run Debian GNU/Linux on all PC systems I use. On that, I mostly
+run text tools. I use
+<a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm">mksh</a> as shell,
+<a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/jupp.htm">jupp</a> as very advanced
+text editor (I even got the developer to help me write a script/macro
+based full-featured student management software with the two),
+<a href="http://mcabber.com/">mcabber</a> for XMPP and
+<a href="http://www.irssi.org/">irssi</a> for IRC. For that overly
+coloured world called the WWW, I use
+<a href="https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/">Iceweasel
+(Firefox)</a>. Oh, and <a href="http://www.mutt.org/">mutt</a> for
+e-mail.</p>
+
+<p>However, while I am personally aware of the fact that text tools
+are more efficient and powerful than anything else, I also use (or at
+least operate) some tools that are suitable to bring open source to
+kids. One of these things is <a href="http://jappix.org/">Jappix</a>,
+which I already introduced to some kids even before they got aware of
+Facebook, making them see for themselves that they do not need
+Facebook now ;).</p>
+
+<p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
+get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
+
+<p>Well, that's a two-sided thing. One side is what I believe, and one
+side is what I have experienced.</p>
+
+<p>I believe that the right strategy is showing them the benefits. But
+that won't work out as long as the acceptance of free alternatives
+grows globally. What I mean is that if all the kids are almost forced
+to use Windows, Facebook, Skype, you name it at home, they will not
+see why they would want to use alternatives at school. I have seen
+students take seat in front of a fully-functional, modern Debian
+desktop that could do anything their Windows at home could do, and
+they jsut refused to use it because "Linux sucks". It is something
+that makes the council of our city spend around 600000 € to buy
+software - not including hardware, mind you - for operating school
+networks, and for installing a system that, as has been proved, does
+not work. For those of you readers who are good at maths, have you
+already found out how many lives could have been saved with that money
+if we had instead used it to bring education to parts of the world
+that need it? I have, and found it to be nothing less dramatic than
+plain criminal.</p>
+
+<p>That said, the only feasible way appears to be the bottom up
+method. We have to bring free software to kids and parents. I have
+founded an association named
+<a href="https://www.teckids.org">Teckids</a> here in Germany that does
+just that. We organise several events for kids and adolescents in the
+area of free and open source software, for example the
+<a href="http://kids.froscon.org">FrogLabs</a>, which share staff with
+Teckids and are the youth programme of
+<a href="http://www.froscon.org">the Free and Open Source Software
+Conference (FrOSCon)</a>. We do a lot more than most other conferences
+- this year, we first offered the FrogLabs as a holiday camp for kids
+aged 10 to 16. It was a huge success, with approx. 30 kids taking part
+and learning with and about free software through a whole weekend. All
+of us had a lot of fun, and the results were really exciting.</p>
+
+<p>Apart from that, we are preparing a campaign that is supposed to bring
+the message of free alternatives to stuff kids use every day to them and
+their parents, e.g. the use of Jabber / Jappix instead of Facebook and
+Skype. To make that possible, we are planning to get together a team of
+clever kids who understand very well what their peers need and can bring
+it across to them. So we will have a peer-driven network of adolescents
+who teach each other and collect feedback from the community of minors.
+We then take that feedback and our own experience to work closely with
+open source projects, such as Skolelinux or Jappix, at improving their
+software in a way that makes it more and more attractive for the target
+group. At least I hope that we will have good cooperation with
+Skolelinux in the future ;)!</p>
+
+<p>So in conclusion, what I believe is that, if it weren't for the world
+being so bad, it should be very clear to the political decision makers
+that the only way to go nowadays is free software for various reasons,
+but I have learnt that the only way that seems to work is bottom up.</p>
+
+<!--
+
+> * Who should be interviewed with this questions in the future?
+
+That's probably the hardest question of them all, as I do not know the
+community. However, I would be willing to do the following:
+
+ <li>Run an interview with a German headteacher who is very open to
+ free software, and also prefers it, but cannot really use it because
+ of the decision makers above;
+ <li>Run interviews with some kids, both with and without previous
+ knowledge about free software
+
+If that is wanted, just let me know ;).
+
+-->
projects / homepage.git / blobdiff