[Commotion-discuss] Some pre-experimentation mesh hardware inquiries

Andrew Reynolds andrew at opentechinstitute.org
Wed Feb 27 11:59:21 UTC 2013


Hello!

We tend to focus on Ubiquiti routers for convenience. We have a lot of
them for our own networks because they're reliable and hard to brick.
Commotion should theoretically run on any OpenWRT-compatible hardware
(http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/start). The biggest problem we've run into
is that some of the smaller routers don't have enough storage for all
the Commotion packages. I believe there's a minimal Commotion
configuration somewhere in the developer archives. I will see if I can
find it.

The setup you describe sounds pretty straightforward. The routers should
just mesh, and there are a couple of ways to add a laptop/fileserver.
You could run the x86 live image, which will turn the laptop into a very
powerful openwrt node, or you could connect the laptop and router via
ethernet cable. Depending on your OS, this might be a good opportunity
to test the new Linux or OS X clients. They're still very rough, but
they might fit in a test network.

We are in the process of packaging and testing a new Commotion release,
which will add a lot of user interface improvements, as well as some
security features.

Finally, you can find all of our source code, including packages that
haven't been added to the official release, on our github account
(https://github.com/opentechinstitute).

Keep us posted on your progress.

-andrew


On 02/27/2013 06:31 AM, Mikael Nordfeldth wrote:
> Hello,
> I'm involved in Umeå Hackerspace, northern Sweden, and we're thinking
> (like so many others) that a wireless mesh network would be great to
> have in our neighbourhood. I've been looking at both Commotion and the
> Byzantium project (http://project-byzantium.org/) for inspiration,
> technology and software.
> 
> From what I can tell Commotion currently has OpenWRT builds for some of
> the Ubiquiti hardware and from what I can tell from documentation this
> is a working solution albeit somewhat hacky and developer-oriented. I
> have a little bit of personal budget to kickstart this project and buy
> hardware to experiment with. My first test scenario is to at least have
> three APs/laptops working in a mesh to connect an apartment a couple of
> blocks away from the source internet connection.
> 
> Any experience-based suggestions on which hardware is best suited,
> general tips for putting up a network like this etc. for someone who's
> only used two OpenWRT boxes to "bridge" before?
> 
> And a bonus inquiry: are there any efforts (or ideas on how much effort
> it would mean) to put Commotion firmware onto common units like the
> Linksys WRT54GL and such?
> 


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