+Title: Oslo community mesh network - with NUUG and Hackeriet at Hausmania
+Tags: english, nuug
+Date: 2013-10-11 17:10
+
+<p>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
+<ahref="http://www.freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a> and
+<ahref="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network</a>
+(see
+<ahref="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region#Greece">wikipedia
+for a large list) around the globe. A nice overview of the Kiel
+Freifunk community can be seen from their
+<ahref="http://freifunk.in-kiel.de/ffmap/nodes.html">dynamically
+updated node graph and map</a>, where one can see how the mesh notes
+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.</p>
+
+<p>I've wanted to check out mesh networks for a while now within the
+<ahref="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member organisation</a> community,
+but my recent involvement in
+<ahref="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">the Freedombox project</a>
+finally lead me to give it 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
+a central hub to tap into to control and listen in on the private
+communication of citizens, which have become more and more important
+over the years.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<ahref="http://hackeriet.no/">Hackeriet</a> at Husmania. They seem to
+have started with some Freifunk based effort using OLSR, called
+<ahref="http://oslo.freifunk.net/index.php?title=Main_Page">the Oslo
+Freifunk project</a>, but this effort seem to be dead and the people
+behind it have moved on to a batman-adv based system called
+<ahref="http://meshfx.org/trac">meshfx</a>. Unfortunately the wiki
+site for the Oslo Freifunk project is no longer possible to update, so
+the project page can't be updated to point to the new project. The
+people at Hackeriet have already invited people from the Freifunk
+community to Oslo to talk about mesh networks, and I came across this
+video where Hans Jørgen Lysglimt interview the speakers about their
+talk:</p>
+
+<p><iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/N2Kd7CLkhSY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
+
+<p>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 this have decided to focus on
+batman-adv for now. It sure help to know that the very cool
+<ahref="http://www.servalproject.org/">Serval project in Australia</a>
+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:
+
+<p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/30qNfzJCQOA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
+
+<p>According to the wikipedia page on
+<ahref="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network">Wireless
+mesh network</a> 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.</p>
+
+</p>The batman-adv 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 vlan you
+can bridge to or handle like any other vlan on 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
+<ahref="http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Quick-start-guide">good
+introduction</a> is available from the Open Mesh project. These are
+the key settings needed to join the Oslo meshfx network:</p>
+
+<table>
+<tr><th>Setting</th></th>Value</th></tr>
+<tr><td>Protocol / kernel module</td><td>batman-adv</td></tr>
+<tr><td>ESSID</td><td>meshfx@hackeriet</td></tr>
+<td>Channel / Frequency</td><td>11 / 2462</td></tr>
+<td>Cell ID</td><td>02:BA:00:00:00:01</td>
+</table>
+
+<p>The reason for setting ad-hoc wifi Cell ID is to work around bugs
+in wifi card firmware and drivers. (See a nice post from VillageTelco
+about
+"<ahref="http://tiebing.blogspot.no/2009/12/ad-hoc-cell-splitting-re-post-original.html">Information
+about cell-id splitting, stuck beacons, and failed IBSS merges!</a>
+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. :)</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>If you find this project interesting and want to join, please join
+us on IRC, either channel
+<ahref="irc://irc.freenode.net/#oslohackerspace">#oslohackerspace</a>
+or <ahref="irc://irc.freenode.net/#nuug">#nuug</a> on
+irc.freenode.net.</p>
+
+<p>While investigating mesh networks in Oslo, I came across an old
+research paper from the university of Stavanger and Telenor Research
+and Innovation called
+<ahref="http://folk.uio.no/paalee/publications/netrel-egeland-iswcs-2008.pdf">The
+reliability of wireless backhaul mesh networks</a> 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?</p>
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