[Commotion-dev] Commotion-splash ready to roll

[Preston Rhea]

For field deployments we'll need to make sure nodogsplash can handle
much more than 3 simultaneous leases. Let's test this on Friday. How
many leases can we get on a node at once?

On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 11:34 AM, Dan Staples
<danstaples at opentechinstitute.org> wrote:
> Glad to hear you've had success with nodogsplash. I'm actually not
> using nodogsplash's bandwidth throttling, since it seems that it
> doesn't work anymore on Attitude Adjustment. I'll do some more testing
> today to see if there are any stability issues.
>
> On Wed 08 May 2013 11:13:58 AM EDT, Ben West wrote:
>> Great work Dan!
>>
>> W/r/t to memory usage, do note that most any bandwidth throttling
>> implementation, whether nodogsplash or the qos-scripts package, is
>> ultimately using buckets to maintain the speed control on clients'
>> sessions.  These buckets exist in memory, with faster bandwidth caps
>> effectively being larger buckets that empty faster.
>>
>> So the effectiveness of the bandwidth throttling depends on the amount
>> available memory, with insufficient memory causing observed clients'
>> bandwidth to degrade.
>>
>> Still, I've generally had good success operating nodogsplash and
>> coovachilli on nodes with 32MB RAM, and on average 2-3 simultaneous
>> clients each with a 3Mbit/s cap.
>>
>> On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 8:09 PM, Dan Staples
>> <danstaples at opentechinstitute.org
>> <mailto:danstaples at opentechinstitute.org>> wrote:
>>
>>     Some background: the LuCI-splash captive portal software is buggy, and
>>     has been causing instability for the DR1 testing release of
>>     Commotion-OpenWRT. So I've set about replacing it with Nodogsplash
>>     (http://kokoro.ucsd.edu/nodogsplash/ [thanks for the suggestion,
>>     Ben!]),
>>     and adding a LuCI configuration page for it and a custom Commotion
>>     splash page. It's now ready for an initial component release and
>>     further
>>     testing.
>>
>>     I've tested a brand new DR1 Picostation image with
>>     Commotion-splash, and
>>     it works great. If anyone wants a demo (in person or virtual), I can
>>     show you tomorrow or whenever. There was one issue that I saw
>>     today, in
>>     which nodogsplash reports using enormous amounts of memory ('VSZ') in
>>     top, in fact sometimes more than 100% of the reported available
>>     memory.
>>     Yet, the node still appears to have around the same amount of free
>>     memory as other DR1 nodes not running nodogsplash, and there have been
>>     no stability issues. So it could be just a fluke. If it doesn't cause
>>     problems, I'm not going to worry...
>>
>>     I transferred ownership of the commotion-splash repo to OTI, and
>>     submitted pull requests for commotion-openwrt, luci-commotion, and
>>     commotion-feed, if any other OTI folks can review those.
>>
>>     What's left is to come up with a solution for captive-portalling
>>     when no
>>     internet access is available (since nodogsplash can't
>>     man-in-the-middles
>>     HTTP requests when clients can't first resolve DNS queries). Josh King
>>     and I talked today about the possibility of running a second
>>     instance of
>>     dnsmasq to man-in-the-middle DNS requests for preauthenticated users.
>>     Hopefully that will work.
>>
>>     Anyway, good riddance to buggy luci-splash!
>>
>>     Dan
>>
>>     --
>>     Dan Staples
>>
>>     Open Technology Institute
>>     https://commotionwireless.net
>>
>>     _______________________________________________
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>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Ben West
>> http://gowasabi.net
>> ben at gowasabi.net <mailto:ben at gowasabi.net>
>> 314-246-9434
>
> --
> Dan Staples
>
> Open Technology Institute
> https://commotionwireless.net
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-- 
Preston Rhea
Program Associate, Open Technology Institute
New America Foundation
+1-202-570-9770
Twitter: @prestonrhea