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

[Mikael Nordfeldth]

2013-02-27 12:59 skrev Andrew Reynolds:
> Keep us posted on your progress.

I got myself a Picostation, Nanostation and a Bullet. So far I've 
played with the Pico and Nano and will put the Bullet into play tonight 
hopefully (as I finally found my antenna). Besides this I'll see what I 
can do with other OpenWRT capable hardware, like the WRT54GL, WR703N, 
DIR-300 etc, that seem to be pretty common and/or cheap hardware. 
Somehow we haven't found a good use for them yet in the hackerspace :)

There was really minimal configuration, which I'm happy about, for 
setting up the mesh nodes and they found each other immediately. However 
I did have some minor trouble setting up an internet connection (maybe 
future UIs can collect all necessary WAN setup on a single page? or 
perhaps I didn't rtfm enough!) but in the end  my neighbours (50+m away, 
through a couple of walls) being able to surf on my connection with 
relatively good speed.

Next step is perhaps to learn how to build my own images so those 
foreign ssh keys aren't there by default ;)

> 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'm definitely interested in trying out Commotion on various OpenWRT 
capable hardware and as I understand it, work is being made to package 
commotion to work better as a repository style installation with opkg 
etc.

> 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.

I'm running GNU/Linux on all my desktop enabled machines, so I'll 
definitely try the Linux client out. I'll scout the sources and also 
have a look at the desktop environment applet stuff (I'm subscribed to 
the dev-list as well).

Thanks for making my experience with using Commotion positive so far! I 
was afraid I'd have to get dirt under my nails just to get it up and 
running to try it out, but this was exceptionally easy.

-- 
Mikael Nordfeldth
http://blog.mmn-o.se/
Xmpp/mail: mmn at hethane.se