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2013</title>
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15 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen
</a>
22 <h3>Entries from October
2013.
</h3>
26 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html">Oslo community mesh network - with NUUG and Hackeriet at Hausmania
</a>
32 <p>Wireless mesh networks are self organising and self healing
33 networks that can be used to connect computers across small and large
34 areas, depending on the radio technology used. Normal wifi equipment
35 can be used to create home made radio networks, and there are several
36 successful examples like
37 <a href=
"http://www.freifunk.net/">Freifunk
</a> and
38 <a href=
"http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network
</a>
40 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region#Greece">wikipedia
41 for a large list
</a>) around the globe. To give you an idea how it
42 work, check out the nice overview of the Kiel Freifunk community which
43 can be seen from their
44 <a href=
"http://freifunk.in-kiel.de/ffmap/nodes.html">dynamically
45 updated node graph and map
</a>, where one can see how the mesh nodes
46 automatically handle routing and recover from nodes disappearing.
47 There is also a small community mesh network group in Oslo, Norway,
48 and that is the main topic of this blog post.
</p>
50 <p>I've wanted to check out mesh networks for a while now, and hoped
51 to do it as part of my involvement with the
<a
52 href=
"http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member organisation
</a> community, and
53 my recent involvement in
54 <a href=
"https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the Freedombox project
</a>
55 finally lead me to give mesh networks some priority, as I suspect a
56 Freedombox should use mesh networks to connect neighbours and family
57 when possible, given that most communication between people are
58 between those nearby (as shown for example by research on Facebook
59 communication patterns). It also allow people to communicate without
60 any central hub to tap into for those that want to listen in on the
61 private communication of citizens, which have become more and more
62 important over the years.
</p>
64 <p>So far I have only been able to find one group of people in Oslo
65 working on community mesh networks, over at the hack space
66 <a href=
"http://hackeriet.no/">Hackeriet
</a> at Husmania. They seem to
67 have started with some Freifunk based effort using OLSR, called
68 <a href=
"http://oslo.freifunk.net/index.php?title=Main_Page">the Oslo
69 Freifunk project
</a>, but that effort is now dead and the people
70 behind it have moved on to a batman-adv based system called
71 <a href=
"http://meshfx.org/trac">meshfx
</a>. Unfortunately the wiki
72 site for the Oslo Freifunk project is no longer possible to update to
73 reflect this fact, so the old project page can't be updated to point to
74 the new project. A while back, the people at Hackeriet invited people
75 from the Freifunk community to Oslo to talk about mesh networks. I
76 came across this video where Hans Jørgen Lysglimt interview the
77 speakers about this talk (from
78 <a href=
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2Kd7CLkhSY">youtube
</a>):
</p>
80 <p><iframe width=
"420" height=
"315" src=
"https://www.youtube.com/embed/N2Kd7CLkhSY" frameborder=
"0" allowfullscreen
></iframe></p>
82 <p>I mentioned OLSR and batman-adv, which are mesh routing protocols.
83 There are heaps of different protocols, and I am still struggling to
84 figure out which one would be "best" for some definitions of best, but
85 given that the community mesh group in Oslo is so small, I believe it
86 is best to hook up with the existing one instead of trying to create a
87 completely different setup, and thus I have decided to focus on
88 batman-adv for now. It sure help me to know that the very cool
89 <a href=
"http://www.servalproject.org/">Serval project in Australia
</a>
90 is using batman-adv as their meshing technology when it create a self
91 organizing and self healing telephony system for disaster areas and
92 less industrialized communities. Check out this cool video presenting
94 <a href=
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30qNfzJCQOA">youtube
</a>):
</p>
96 <p><iframe width=
"560" height=
"315" src=
"https://www.youtube.com/embed/30qNfzJCQOA" frameborder=
"0" allowfullscreen
></iframe></p>
98 <p>According to the wikipedia page on
99 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network">Wireless
100 mesh network
</a> there are around
70 competing schemes for routing
101 packets across mesh networks, and OLSR, B.A.T.M.A.N. and
102 B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced are protocols used by several free software
103 based community mesh networks.
</p>
105 <p>The batman-adv protocol is a bit special, as it provide layer
2
106 (as in ethernet ) routing, allowing ipv4 and ipv6 to work on the same
107 network. One way to think about it is that it provide a mesh based
108 vlan you can bridge to or handle like any other vlan connected to your
109 computer. The required drivers are already in the Linux kernel at
110 least since Debian Wheezy, and it is fairly easy to set up. A
111 <a href=
"http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Quick-start-guide">good
112 introduction
</a> is available from the Open Mesh project. These are
113 the key settings needed to join the Oslo meshfx network:
</p>
116 <tr><th>Setting
</th><th>Value
</th></tr>
117 <tr><td>Protocol / kernel module
</td><td>batman-adv
</td></tr>
118 <tr><td>ESSID
</td><td>meshfx@hackeriet
</td></tr>
119 <td>Channel / Frequency
</td><td>11 /
2462</td></tr>
120 <td>Cell ID
</td><td>02:BA:
00:
00:
00:
01</td>
123 <p>The reason for setting ad-hoc wifi Cell ID is to work around bugs
124 in firmware used in wifi card and wifi drivers. (See a nice post from
126 "
<a href=
"http://tiebing.blogspot.no/2009/12/ad-hoc-cell-splitting-re-post-original.html">Information
127 about cell-id splitting, stuck beacons, and failed IBSS merges!
</a>
128 for details.) When these settings are activated and you have some
129 other mesh node nearby, your computer will be connected to the mesh
130 network and can communicate with any mesh node that is connected to
131 any of the nodes in your network of nodes. :)
</p>
133 <p>My initial plan was to reuse my old Linksys WRT54GL as a mesh node,
134 but that seem to be very hard, as I have not been able to locate a
135 firmware supporting batman-adv. If anyone know how to use that old
136 wifi access point with batman-adv these days, please let me know.
</p>
138 <p>If you find this project interesting and want to join, please join
139 us on IRC, either channel
140 <a href=
"irc://irc.freenode.net/#oslohackerspace">#oslohackerspace
</a>
141 or
<a href=
"irc://irc.freenode.net/#nuug">#nuug
</a> on
142 irc.freenode.net.
</p>
144 <p>While investigating mesh networks in Oslo, I came across an old
145 research paper from the university of Stavanger and Telenor Research
146 and Innovation called
147 <a href=
"http://folk.uio.no/paalee/publications/netrel-egeland-iswcs-2008.pdf">The
148 reliability of wireless backhaul mesh networks
</a> and elsewhere
149 learned that Telenor have been experimenting with mesh networks at
150 Grünerløkka in Oslo. So mesh networks are also interesting for
151 commercial companies, even though Telenor discovered that it was hard
152 to figure out a good business plan for mesh networking and as far as I
153 know have closed down the experiment. Perhaps Telenor or others would
154 be interested in a cooperation?
</p>
156 <p><strong>Update
2013-
10-
12</strong>: I was just
157 <a href=
"http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2013-October/005900.html">told
158 by the Serval project developers
</a> that they no longer use
159 batman-adv (but are compatible with it), but their own crypto based
166 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freedombox">freedombox
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug
</a>.
171 <div class=
"padding"></div>
175 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux___Debian_Edu_7_1_install_and_overview_video_from_Marcelo_Salvador.html">Skolelinux / Debian Edu
7.1 install and overview video from Marcelo Salvador
</a>
181 <p>The other day I was pleased and surprised to discover that Marcelo
182 Salvador had published a
183 <a href=
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-GgpdqgLFc">video on
184 Youtube
</a> showing how to install the standalone Debian Edu /
185 Skolelinux profile. This is the profile intended for use at home or
186 on laptops that should not be integrated into the provided network
187 services (no central home directory, no Kerberos / LDAP directory etc,
188 in other word a single user machine). The result is
11 minutes long,
189 and show some user applications (seem to be rather randomly picked).
190 Missed a few of my favorites like celestia, planets and chromium
191 showing the
<a href=
"http://www.zygotebody.com/">Zygote Body
3D model
192 of the human body
</a>, but I guess he did not know about those or find
193 other programs more interesting. :) And the video do not show the
194 advantages I believe is one of the most valuable featuers in Debian
195 Edu, its central school server making it possible to run hundreds of
196 computers without hard drives by installing one central
197 <a href=
"http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP server
</a>.
</p>
199 <p>Anyway, check out the video, embedded below and linked to above:
</p>
201 <iframe width=
"420" height=
"315" src=
"http://www.youtube.com/embed/w-GgpdqgLFc" frameborder=
"0" allowfullscreen
></iframe>
203 <p>Are there other nice videos demonstrating Skolelinux? Please let
210 Tags:
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english
</a>,
<a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video
</a>.
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460 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (
4)
</a></li>
462 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (
4)
</a></li>
464 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (
43)
</a></li>
466 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (
3)
</a></li>
468 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (
8)
</a></li>
470 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (
18)
</a></li>
472 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (
1)
</a></li>
474 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (
8)
</a></li>
476 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (
39)
</a></li>
478 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (
4)
</a></li>
480 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (
28)
</a></li>
486 <p style=
"text-align: right">
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