[Commotion-dev] Agenda, priorities, collaboration, and other such things

[Brian Duggan]

Chris mentioned a reading group that I think it'd be good for
Chambananites to be aware of:

Makerspace Urbana in the Independent Media Center just started a reading
group for Wireless Networking in the Developing World (wndw.net) last
week. That goes at 7:00pm on Thursday nights.

Most of the people in the reading group are new to mesh, olsrd, and
OpenWrt, but they are dedicated and passionate individuals. I've asked
if they would be interested in helping with this project.

It would be great if other folks in the Chambana area could drop by. We
could meet each other in person and have a chance to discuss the project
and engage the other members of the reading group.

So if you're in Chambana and you're free at 7 this Thursday, stop by 202
S Broadway in Urbana (old Post Office), next to Lincoln Square Mall.
Head downstairs to the Makerspace.

Thanks!
Brian

On 2/1/11 10:05 AM, Tim Yardley wrote:
> Agreed that there are a lot of options out there, but for now... let's
> go with what we know works.
> 
> On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 9:58 AM, Outback Dingo <outbackdingo at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 7:57 AM, Chris Ritzo <chris.ritzo at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hey all, just wanted to say first how awesome it is to have some new
>>> folks interested in hacking about on mesh wifi.
>>> Thanks to Brian I have the reading group time on my calendar, so I'll
>>> plan to talk more with you all there, but here are some initial
>>> thoughts to some of the recent discussion.
>>>
>>> First things first, in addition to the git repo, we have some online
>>> docs that we'd like you to have access to, read, and eventually edit.
>>> To give you group access to the wiki, please create an account on
>>> http://plexus.chambana.net - It's the frontend for requesting an LDAP
>>> account on chambana.net servers. More info on that later.
>>>
>>> On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 12:58 AM, Erich Heine <sophacles at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Hi all,
>>>> Just want to get a discussion going on-list about stuff related to the
>>>> actual work at hand.  What is the agenda? What is done, and what needs
>>>> doing?
>>>
>>> These are not in any sort of priority order...
>>> - *finish* a commotion image with the basic services running and
>>> deploy a test bed mesh within the IMC. Thanks to Brian's work this is
>>> almost done. The test bed will be our internal testing ground for
>>> whatever needs tested: bandwidth tests, distributed services,
>>> whatever. We also have access to outdoor hardware and could then
>>> expand that test mesh into downtown Urbana.
>>> - new WRT theme. write a new frontend theme (programmed in Lua/Luci
>>> http://luci.subsignal.org/ ) and application hooks for openwrt,
>>> customized for commotion firmware. This isn't a huge priority, but
>>> ties into the next item.
>>> - write a 1-2-3 setup Lua/Luci based init script that allows easy
>>> setup. one of the big goals that we have is a GUI frontend for the
>>> init scripts that Josh has worked on. This would need to be simple,
>>> allow a series of choices for a person with no technical knowledge to
>>> fill in some details (perhaps given to them by us or someone else
>>> technical who is deploying a mesh) that configs their device to joint
>>> the mesh, share bandwidth, etc.
>>> - Some talk on the list about Batman, Batman Advanced, and OpenMesh.
>>> These are great technologies and we could certainly use them. In fact,
>>> OTi would like to roll all of them into commotion so that the user or
>>> group deploying a mesh could choose which protocol they want to use.
>>> The OpenMesh dashboard is nice, and Josh has planed to roll it into
>>> the commotion firmware.bhead-11n-ampdurx-only
>>
>> Ok, my thoughts are we want this to work, and there have been many instances
>> where open-mesh has not been available
>> plus the Robin firmware as has been mentioned before is not the best design,
>> and lacks stability in alot of cases, as for olsr
>> or batman-adv... well theres also babel/babelz......   though only olsr has
>> a windows client, i question is a client is needed though
>> users can connect to an AP anyway. A dashboard would be nice, so would
>> autoconfiguration, instead of focusing on a luci ui
>> make its plug & play... this is where I can help in the design of the image,
>> we have existing c code that does exactly this. What we
>> lack a decent dashboard
>>
>>>
>>> - Why not just go with OpenMesh? I dunno, you tell me. What I've been
>>> told is that OLSR is simply a better routing protocol, just doesn't
>>> have the non-techie frontend yet. We're on the bleeding edge here
>>> folks, so any direction is fine. I could see us putting together a
>>> small OpenMesh test bed and do comparison tests with the OLSR test
>>> bed.
>>
>> OM is basically, IMHO complete over engineered crap, as for the protocol
>> WBM has proven time and time again, that OLSR might not be the best
>> but yes it does work. Theres an array of protocols out there, all of them
>> solid
>> and will do the job
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>> http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/commotion-dev
>>
>>
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-- 
Brian Duggan
Technical Projects Developer
UC Independent Media Center
http://www.ucimc.org | 631 223 8442