For å ta et lite eksempel: Stortingets nettsted,
www.stortinget.no (og
forsåvidt også
data.stortinget.no),
inneholder informasjon om det som foregår på Stortinget, og jeg antar
de største brukerne av informasjonen der er representanter og
rådgivere på Stortinget. Intet overraskende med det. Det som derimot
er mer skjult er at Stortingets nettsted bruker
Google
Analytics, hvilket gjør at enhver som besøker nettsidene der også
rapporterer om besøket via Internett-linjer som passerer Sverige,
England og videre til USA. Det betyr at informasjon om ethvert besøk
på stortingets nettsider kan snappes opp av svensk, britisk og USAs
etterretningsvesen. De kan dermed holde et øye med hvilke
Stortingssaker stortingsrepresentantene synes er interessante å sjekke
ut, og hvilke sider rådgivere og andre på stortinget synes er
interessant å besøke, når de gjør det og hvilke andre representanter
som sjekker de samme sidene omtrent samtidig. Stortingets bruk av
Google Analytics gjør det dermed enkelt for utenlands etteretning å
spore representantenes aktivitet og interesse. Hvis noen av
representantene bruker Google Mail eller noen andre tjenestene som
krever innlogging, så vil det være enda enklere å finne ut nøyaktig
hvilke personer som bruker hvilke nettlesere og dermed knytte
informasjonen opp til enkeltpersoner på Stortinget.
Og jo flere nettsteder som bruker Google Analytics, jo bedre
oversikt over stortingsrepresentantenes lesevaner og interesse blir
tilgjengelig for svensk, britisk og USAs etterretning. Hva de kan
bruke den informasjonen til overlater jeg til leseren å undres
over.
The last few days I have been experimenting with
the
batman-adv mesh technology. I want to gain some experience to see
if it will fit the
Freedombox project, 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.
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
Raspberry Pi, 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 the Serval
Project 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.
To get this working, I've created a debian package
meshfx-node
and a script
build-rpi-mesh-node
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.
To create an image, run the following with a sudo enabled user
after inserting the target SD card into the build machine:
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
an
earlier blog post about this mesh testing.
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:
Supplier
Model
NOK
Teknikkmagasinet
Raspberry Pi model B
349.90
Teknikkmagasinet
Raspberry Pi type B case
99.90
Lefdal
Jensen Air:Link 25150
295.-
Clas Ohlson
Kingston 16 GB SD card
199.-
Total cost
943.80
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. :)
Back in 2010, I created a Perl library to talk to
the Spykee robot
(with two belts, wifi, USB and Linux) and made it available from my
web page. Today I concluded that it should move to a site that is
easier to use to cooperate with others, and moved it to github. If
you got a Spykee robot, you might want to check out
the
libspykee-perl github repository.
The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get
wider attention. I recommend signing and donating to each one of
these. :)
Via Debian
Project News for 2013-10-14 I came across the Outreach Program for
Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get
more women involved in free software. One debian sponsor has offered
to match any donation done to Debian
earmarked for this initiative. I donated a few minutes ago, and
hope you will to. :)
And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to
create video
documentaries about the excessive spying on every Internet user that
take place these days, and their need to fund the work. I've already
donated. Are you next?
For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og
Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a
statement under the heading
Bloggers United for Open
Access for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the
Norwegian government. So far 499 signatures. I hope you will sign it
too.
Wireless mesh networks are self organising and self healing
networks that can be used to connect computers across small and large
areas, depending on the radio technology used. Normal wifi equipment
can be used to create home made radio networks, and there are several
successful examples like
Freifunk and
Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network
(see
wikipedia
for a large list) around the globe. To give you an idea how it
work, check out the nice overview of the Kiel Freifunk community which
can be seen from their
dynamically
updated node graph and map, where one can see how the mesh nodes
automatically handle routing and recover from nodes disappearing.
There is also a small community mesh network group in Oslo, Norway,
and that is the main topic of this blog post.
I've wanted to check out mesh networks for a while now, and hoped
to do it as part of my involvement with the NUUG member organisation community, and
my recent involvement in
the Freedombox project
finally lead me to give mesh networks some priority, as I suspect a
Freedombox should use mesh networks to connect neighbours and family
when possible, given that most communication between people are
between those nearby (as shown for example by research on Facebook
communication patterns). It also allow people to communicate without
any central hub to tap into for those that want to listen in on the
private communication of citizens, which have become more and more
important over the years.
So far I have only been able to find one group of people in Oslo
working on community mesh networks, over at the hack space
Hackeriet at Husmania. They seem to
have started with some Freifunk based effort using OLSR, called
the Oslo
Freifunk project, but that effort is now dead and the people
behind it have moved on to a batman-adv based system called
meshfx. Unfortunately the wiki
site for the Oslo Freifunk project is no longer possible to update to
reflect this fact, so the old project page can't be updated to point to
the new project. A while back, the people at Hackeriet invited people
from the Freifunk community to Oslo to talk about mesh networks. I
came across this video where Hans Jørgen Lysglimt interview the
speakers about this talk (from
youtube):
I mentioned OLSR and batman-adv, which are mesh routing protocols.
There are heaps of different protocols, and I am still struggling to
figure out which one would be "best" for some definitions of best, but
given that the community mesh group in Oslo is so small, I believe it
is best to hook up with the existing one instead of trying to create a
completely different setup, and thus I have decided to focus on
batman-adv for now. It sure help me to know that the very cool
Serval project in Australia
is using batman-adv as their meshing technology when it create a self
organizing and self healing telephony system for disaster areas and
less industrialized communities. Check out this cool video presenting
that project (from
youtube):
According to the wikipedia page on
Wireless
mesh network there are around 70 competing schemes for routing
packets across mesh networks, and OLSR, B.A.T.M.A.N. and
B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced are protocols used by several free software
based community mesh networks.
The batman-adv protocol is a bit special, as it provide layer 2
(as in ethernet ) routing, allowing ipv4 and ipv6 to work on the same
network. One way to think about it is that it provide a mesh based
vlan you can bridge to or handle like any other vlan connected to your
computer. The required drivers are already in the Linux kernel at
least since Debian Wheezy, and it is fairly easy to set up. A
good
introduction is available from the Open Mesh project. These are
the key settings needed to join the Oslo meshfx network:
Setting
Value
Protocol / kernel module
batman-adv
ESSID
meshfx@hackeriet
Channel / Frequency
11 / 2462
Cell ID
02:BA:00:00:00:01
The reason for setting ad-hoc wifi Cell ID is to work around bugs
in firmware used in wifi card and wifi drivers. (See a nice post from
VillageTelco about
"Information
about cell-id splitting, stuck beacons, and failed IBSS merges!
for details.) When these settings are activated and you have some
other mesh node nearby, your computer will be connected to the mesh
network and can communicate with any mesh node that is connected to
any of the nodes in your network of nodes. :)
My initial plan was to reuse my old Linksys WRT54GL as a mesh node,
but that seem to be very hard, as I have not been able to locate a
firmware supporting batman-adv. If anyone know how to use that old
wifi access point with batman-adv these days, please let me know.
If you find this project interesting and want to join, please join
us on IRC, either channel
#oslohackerspace
or #nuug on
irc.freenode.net.
While investigating mesh networks in Oslo, I came across an old
research paper from the university of Stavanger and Telenor Research
and Innovation called
The
reliability of wireless backhaul mesh networks and elsewhere
learned that Telenor have been experimenting with mesh networks at
Grünerløkka in Oslo. So mesh networks are also interesting for
commercial companies, even though Telenor discovered that it was hard
to figure out a good business plan for mesh networking and as far as I
know have closed down the experiment. Perhaps Telenor or others would
be interested in a cooperation?
Update 2013-10-12: I was just
told
by the Serval project developers that they no longer use
batman-adv (but are compatible with it), but their own crypto based
mesh system.
The other day I was pleased and surprised to discover that Marcelo
Salvador had published a
video on
Youtube showing how to install the standalone Debian Edu /
Skolelinux profile. This is the profile intended for use at home or
on laptops that should not be integrated into the provided network
services (no central home directory, no Kerberos / LDAP directory etc,
in other word a single user machine). The result is 11 minutes long,
and show some user applications (seem to be rather randomly picked).
Missed a few of my favorites like celestia, planets and chromium
showing the Zygote Body 3D model
of the human body, but I guess he did not know about those or find
other programs more interesting. :) And the video do not show the
advantages I believe is one of the most valuable featuers in Debian
Edu, its central school server making it possible to run hundreds of
computers without hard drives by installing one central
LTSP server.
Anyway, check out the video, embedded below and linked to above:
Are there other nice videos demonstrating Skolelinux? Please let
me know. :)
A few hours ago, the announcement for the first stable release of
Debian Edu Wheezy went out from the Debian publicity team. The
complete announcement text can be found at
the Debian News
section, translated to several languages. Please check it out.
There is one minor known problem that we will fix very soon. One
can not install a amd64 Thin Client Server using PXE, as the /var/
partition is too small. A workaround is to extend the partition (use
lvresize + resize2fs in tty 2 while installing).
The Freedombox
project have been going on for a while, and have presented the
vision, ideas and solution several places. Here is a little
collection of videos of talks and presentation of the project.
On other news, I am happy to report that Freedombox based on Debian
Jessie is coming along quite well, and soon both Owncloud and using
Tor should be available for testers of the Freedombox solution. :) In
a few weeks I hope everything needed to test it is included in Debian.
The withsqlite package is already in Debian, and the plinth package is
pending in NEW. The third and vital part of that puzzle is the
metapackage/setup framework, which is still pending an upload. Join
us on IRC
(#freedombox on irc.debian.org) and
the
mailing list if you want to help make this vision come true.
The third wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
today. This is the release announcement from Holger Levsen:
Hi,
it is my pleasure to announce the third beta release (beta 2 for
short) of Debian Edu /
Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy!
Please test these images extensivly, if no new problems are found
we plan to do this final Debian Edu Wheezy release this coming
weekend. We are not aware of any major problems or blockers in beta2,
if you find something, please notify us immediately!
(More about the remaining steps for the Edu Wheezy release in
another mail to the edu list tonight or tomorrow...)
Noteworthy changes and software updates for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b2
compared to beta1:
The KDE proxy setup has been adjusted to use the provided wpad.dat. This
also gets Chromium to use this proxy.
Install kdepim-groupware with KDE desktops to make sure korganizer
understand ical/dav sources.
Increased default maximum size of /var/spool/squid and /skole/backup on the
main server.
A source DVD image containing all source packages is now available as well.
The SHA1SUM of this image is: 702d1718548f401c74bfa6df9f032cc3ee16597e
The Source DVD image has the filename
debian-edu-7.1+edu0~b2-source-DVD.iso and the SHA1SUM
089eed8b3f962db47aae1f6a9685e9bb2fa30ca5 and is available the same way
as the other isos.
Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
services. The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE and Xfce desktop environment.
This is the seventh test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
Squeeze release.
Notes for upgrades from Alpha Prereleases
Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined on the mailing list. (2)
Accept the new version of gosa.conf and replace both contained admin
password placeholders with the password hashes found in the old one
(backup copy!). In both cases all users need to change their password
to make sure a password is set for CIFS access to their home
directory.
I was introduced to the
Freedombox project
in 2010, when Eben Moglen presented his vision about serving the need
of non-technical people to keep their personal information private and
within the legal protection of their own homes. The idea is to give
people back the power over their network and machines, and return
Internet back to its intended peer-to-peer architecture. Instead of
depending on a central service, the Freedombox will give everyone
control over their own basic infrastructure.
I've intended to join the effort since then, but other tasks have
taken priority. But this summers nasty news about the misuse of trust
and privilege exercised by the "western" intelligence gathering
communities increased my eagerness to contribute to a point where I
actually started working on the project a while back.
The initial
Debian initiative based on the vision from Eben Moglen, is to
create a simple and cheap Debian based appliance that anyone can hook
up in their home and get access to secure and private services and
communication. The initial deployment platform have been the
Dreamplug,
which is a piece of hardware I do not own. So to be able to test what
the current Freedombox setup look like, I had to come up with a way to install
it on some hardware I do have access to. I have rewritten the
freedom-maker
image build framework to use .deb packages instead of only copying
setup into the boot images, and thanks to this rewrite I am able to
set up any machine supported by Debian Wheezy as a Freedombox, using
the previously mentioned deb (and a few support debs for packages
missing in Debian).
The current Freedombox setup consist of a set of bootstrapping
scripts
(freedombox-setup),
and a administrative web interface
(plinth + exmachina +
withsqlite), as well as a privacy enhancing proxy based on
privoxy
(freedombox-privoxy). There is also a web/javascript based XMPP
client (jwchat)
trying (unsuccessfully so far) to talk to the XMPP server
(ejabberd). The
web interface is pluggable, and the goal is to use it to enable OpenID
services, mesh network connectivity, use of TOR, etc, etc. Not much of
this is really working yet, see
the
project TODO for links to GIT repositories. Most of the code is
on github at the moment. The HTTP proxy is operational out of the
box, and the admin web interface can be used to add/remove plinth
users. I've not been able to do anything else with it so far, but
know there are several branches spread around github and other places
with lots of half baked features.
Anyway, if you want to have a look at the current state, the
following recipes should work to give you a test machine to poke
at.
Debian Wheezy amd64
Fetch normal Debian Wheezy installation ISO.
Boot from it, either as CD or USB stick.
Press [tab] on the boot prompt and add this as a boot argument
to the Debian installer:
You can test it on other architectures too, but because the
freedombox-privoxy package is binary, it will only work as intended on
the architectures where I have had time to build the binary and put it
in my APT repository. But do not let this stop you. It is only a
short "apt-get source -b freedombox-privoxy" away. :)
Note that by default Freedombox is a DHCP server on the
192.168.1.0/24 subnet, so if this is your subnet be careful and turn
off the DHCP server by running "update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server
disable" as root.
Please let me know if this works for you, or if you have any
problems. We gather on the IRC channel
#freedombox on
irc.debian.org and the
project
mailing list.
Once you get your freedombox operational, you can visit
http://your-host-name:8001/ to see the state of the plint
welcome screen (dead end - do not be surprised if you are unable to
get past it), and next visit http://your-host-name:8001/help/
to look at the rest of plinth. The default user is 'admin' and the
default password is 'secret'.
