Mesh/28 February 2017

Sudomesh meeting - 28 feb 2017

attendees

• jnny - working on outreach, wants to work on cleaning up the wiki
• juul - working on the live node map
• shaene - tourist here from familab in florida, has NFC tag implents
• Will - community organizing & getting folks excited
• Jorrit - works on a software-defined mesh playground called babeld-lab, and working on noob-tutorial for people's open network
• jehan - working on a new and improved dashboard for our firmware, with status of mesh and what's plugged in
• arthur - somewhat new. not quite sure how to help out. come be a floater for the upcoming workshop.
• daniel - been with sudomesh from about a year after it started. excited about project. helps out here and there.
• steven - a friend of his who couldn't be here found out about it.
• grant - working on the babeld lab with jorrit
• lesley - working on the dashboard w/ jehan
• andrew - working on random stuff. made a flyer and helps to organize workshop. hacks on router stuff.
• hillary - member of sudo room and generally supports what's going on - does computer in a box education for kids where they take apart and put back together

agenda

updates

babeld lab:

• Have a two-node virtual babeld mesh using linux network namespaces (like docker)
• grant is expanding to make it work with an arbirary number of nodes

Inventory restock:

• Incoming ~100 Western Digital My Net N600 routers at $16 a pop
• Incoming 10 NanoBridge M5 25 dBi version (very long range. good for 20+ km links) at $54 (retail price $110)
  • Product replaced by LiteBeam M5 23 dBi version which retails for $46 but isn't yet supported by OpenWRT (62.5% less range)
  • Closest current OpenWRT supported product is NanoBeam M5 19 dBi, so 4 dBi less which is 2.5 times less range
• We still need a stock of NanoStation M5 and M2 (or NanoStation M5/M2 Loco but never buy those used as older models have a hardware bug)
  • NanoStation is still $79 and no cheaper replacement in sight. Very useful for window installation.

Mesh maps:

• LibreMap: No longer maintained
• NodeShot: No longer maintained and couldn't find info on how to use it
• NodeWatcher: Should be possible to run in "map only" mode. Tried installing but ran into bugs. Will report to wlan slovenja devs.
• Started building a simple map: https://github.com/sudomesh/peoples-map
  • So far very simple client side code only
  • Will check node status by consulting exit node's babeld (version 0.0.0 - unmappable list)
  • Will get addresses from our meshnode database (version 0.0.1 - node locations and online status)
  • Will get connections by asking individual nodes for their babeld output using ubus-http (version 1.0.0 - maps node to node connections)
    • Will need to save data in a DB and have re-query all nodes every n minutes
    • Need to add a "info only" user to the ACL on all nodes

Nonprofit Entity Structure

• Omni's old nonprofit (501c3) entity is being phased out - however, we could take it over, amend the activities slightly

Breakout Groups

• messaging for the workshop - jorrit, andy, will, jenny, ?
• frontend dashboard hacking - jehan, leslie, juul
• mapping / monitoring
• intro / questions toward creating an intro guide

https://pad.riseup.net/p/byoi

todo

• Switch over to hurricane electric
  • Set up old CCL server with Debian Jessie and RAID 1
• Order more stickers
• Get examples of live router info for dashboard (jehan and juul)
• Set up netbooks with ubiquiti nodes on poles for live demo
• Print and laminate RJ45 wiring diagrams (or design and order stickers)
• Finalize wording for flyer/poster
• Organize incoming my net n600 routers
• Hack on introductory guide
• Hack on software projects
  • The mesh experimenters setup
  • The new dashboard
  • The mesh monitor map
• Test range of My Net N600 with $14 chinese panel antenna
• Schedule a board meeting to decide on entity structure