[Commotion-discuss] CW Firmware on a Ubiquiti Picostation M2HP

Nicolas North star at nikksno.io
Sun May 29 21:27:44 UTC 2016


Hi Josh
Thank you so much for replying.

I had replied this morning but got stuck in the moderation queue. I’ve updated my reply and I’m sending it again now.

I've been thinking over and over about what to do all week and today I've been getting a little lost as nothing really seems to work. Your reply comes at the perfect time. Thank you.

Thank you very very much for your testing on the pico station and Ben for your copy of airos firmware 5.5.2. I tried downgrading to it and then made the switch over to cw firmware and it worked!!! I rebooted the pico and the config is still there! You’re super awesome! I still have to figure out how to get it to recognise the dhcp-enabled lan i’m connecting it to via ethernet as it doesn’t seem to get a lease and if i connect to it via wifi it says it’s not providing gateway. I’ve read that the mesh and wifi layers should be separate [and I was actually looking to mesh over 5ghz and wifi over 2.4ghz (see tplink section in paragraph below)] so I’m thinking of all the possible setups but I’d need to be able to use the ethernet port of the pico either as in a wan style to provide gateway to it [only for internet, no wired meshing ever], or to use it as a lan port and attach an access point so that it can handle the wifi layer, leaving the pico to only provide the mesh layer. What do you guys think? How important is it to keep the layers separate? Is the mesh on 5ghz and wifi over 2.4ghz idea sound / realistic / desirable?

About the tplink: I'm very lucky you have the same router at home Ben. I've installed openwrt but was struggling to figure out how to get the 5ghz part working. I'm not sure why I didn't find any info related to ac not working on the openwrt site. I've found info about two different v2 models but I seem to be just under the serial number threshold [assuming that letters come after numbers in true hexadecimal style]. The idea was to mesh over 5ghz and create WiFi over 2.4ghz so it's definitely important to have the former working perfectly. In any event could you please send me the image you are using at home? That would be fantastic. I can't seem to find it anywhere!

Do you think I should look into a similar router without ac to be on the safe side?

Since I started writing this reply I've taken a look at the other mail where you suggested the Detroit community technology project and I am trying to piece things together to figure out the best approach but I'm really confused.

I've spent six hours the other night following the metamesh documentation [written for a picostation] but I can't seem to adapt the configuration to a more complex router like the tplink because of it having both a Wan and a Lan port set.

The bottom line is that I'd love to use commotion. If I get the picostation working with lan and / or wan functionality I will have to evaluate whether it's a sound investment to try another bullet and yet another picostation [maybe on 5ghz as i mentioned earlier]. If instead I had an image for a tplink router I can actually purchase here in Italy or knew how to compile it for said router it would make things very easy. I wouldn't be able to install it maybe on all the various routers I'm finding in people's homes but as they're all mostly proprietary and maybe locked down they don't have an option to flash firmware via Web interface so I wouldn't know how to make the switch to openwrt or anything else anyway on those devices.

Metamesh and other projects like qmp that work on top of standard openwrt installations need a non ac router at this point and I need to figure out how to configure a router that is not a picostation but one with Wan, Lan, and two WiFi interfaces.

I really think our setup should be fairly normal and common: lots of houses distributed in an open area, soon we'll have fiber and I'd love for all 300 of us to just get 4 contracts and share everything instead of buying 300 of those contracts everyone for himself [that's why I really need to show this works now], use existing infrastructure as much as possible [home routers, at least as access points if i can’t install cw / openwrt on them so that they can actually mesh] and ease of installation with cross compatibility. I think that meshing over 5ghz and WiFi-ying over 2.4ghz is the way to go since I need WiFi to enter houses and have good strength and so on. If I have to replace routers and APs I will but I need to know what works with openwrt and if I should keep my hopes up for commotion or I should use something else provided I find how to do so for non ubiquiti devices. It’s also true that if cw and openwrt + olsr are compatible i won’t be forced to take sides right away at least.

Thank you so much for your help, I really appreciate it and will definitely send you the donation as promised plus recurring monthly donations if the project takes off. I hope you have that firmware for the tplink and maybe some ideas to point me in the right direction. I’m starting to feel it can work but need your help to figure it all out. Thank you.



Nicolas

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