Mesh/20 November 2018

People's Open Network Weekly Meeting - 20 November 2018 7:30pm-9pm

Agenda

  • Introductions and Meeting Roles (10 mins)
  • Check in on previous action items (5 mins)
  • Updates & Reportbacks (20 mins)
  • Next Sunday (5 mins)
  • Proposal X: (15 mins)
  • Discussion Y: (15 mins)
  • Discussion Z (15 mins)
  • Action Items (5 mins)
  • Breakout Groups

Introductions

Introduce yourself: Name; Preferred Pronoun; Icebreaker Response; BRIEF Announcements

  • Icebreaker question: what's the last good book you read?
  • benny: i'm benny, he/him, the broken earth trilogy (the second one). allegories about crazy power relationships. also all about climate change.
  • marc/juul - he/him - mostly been reading web serials not books, but went to see kim stanley robinson read recently and it was incredible - red moon - about china and the future - fiction / scifi
  • scott - the last book i read was sourdough. iw was good. about the bay area and magical sourdough. also the wayfarer series which is amazing
  • seth - he/they - discovered this "protocol" book by alexander galloway at the toronto mesh conf - interesting tidbit about etoy at the end
  • null - he/him/they/them - i dont read a lot of books, last trilogy i read was the first harry potter book. mostly read stuff online. i want to read fight club.
    • leslie - he released a sequel as a graphic novel
  • tyler - sorta brand new here. first time at this meeting at least. sorta technical as well. the last not a textbook book i read was the metamorphosis. i barely remember but you could ask me to reference something from an americam ham relay magazine and i'll give you some pointers. i do Ham.
  • leslie - wish it was something interesting and new. i just finally got around to reading the dispossed. glad i didn't put it off more. i've read more disturbing things that were more utopian.

Announcements

  • Roof
    • juul - robb (and a little me) cleaned the entire roof. we spent ~9 gallons of the patch goop and there's still a ton of holes. there's an area that's comepletely fked. I spent an hour sitting there with a heat gun and there was still a lot of water that we couldnt get out. something needs to be done to that section of the roof.
      • null - i know it's a little late now but i have an ultrasonic leak detector that you can use to detect pockets where the sound passes through
      • juul - someone came by and taught us an easy way to spot leaks in a roof -- wait for it to rain, then wait for it to be sunny for a while, then use thermal camera to look for cold spots
      • juul - if it doesnt rain tomorrow, would be good to go up and do more work. tons more to be done. we've tackled the most serious areas.
      • juul - if you come to do roof work, make sure you wear gloves and clothes you dont care about!
      • Seth-i'm down to help with the roof for the next patching round.
  • Post your BYOI feedback!
   ** REMEMBER TO POST YOUR BACKFEEDS!
  • Need to fundraise to pay this person to develop an open source firmware/driver!
    • juul - I was extremely excited about something nico told me. There are 2 open source drivers for 2 different chip sets that do wifi. They're all "hard mac" where layer 2 is baked into the chip. The problem is that even though the driver is open source, the firmware is not. (802.11a/c). Apparently someone who is writing a new driver has convinced (a manufacturer?) to let him write a new open source firmware for a new chipset that will support (802.11a/c)!!!! The only gotcha is that he needs to get paid. He says w/ 40K he will write a new firmware.
      • benny: why is this routing code always so chipset dependant.

Meeting Roles

Check in on previous action items

Check previous meeting minutes at https://sudoroom.org/wiki/Mesh/Minutes and past action items below:

  • Contact potential node in East Bay Hills (deep east) - Jenny
  • Ask sierk about BYOI - bennyny
    • thank you for the coffee!
  • check in for paxio e-mail reply
    • did not get but juul will send a follow up and he double checked the LOS
  • go to internet archive and install servers
    • bennyny replied to jonah
    • measure how much power our setup uses
      • potentially do it after this meeting (juul + null)
    • buy UPS (Uninterrupted Power Supply)
    • ask yar if the UPS in sudo can be used at the internet archive or is it reserved for sudo use
      • yar says we can use it

Updates & Reportbacks

Bugs/Technical

Priority bugs we need help with are located at: http://peoplesopen.net/helpwanted - For a high-level overview of recent Github activity, see the Trello: https://trello.com/invite/b/r9l5ouQ4/3b2eecd83bb9e7a57a339cf1ee038288/sudo-mesh-github-repos

  • lesley - was looking at how the n600s automatically change pw at midnight. might be easier to just put it in the walkthrough?
    • null - there is a file that shows up "autoconf succeeded!" that tells you next steps.
    • juul - wonder what libremesh does for this

Node Mounts & Outreach

Node Mounts Trello: https://trello.com/invite/b/DtzngKaM/49e1c21fc9da199fcdeceb8623b5117a/node-mounts

  • leslie: awesome. a lot more new people than i expected

Communications & Events

Comms Trello: https://trello.com/invite/b/f3ugMPNU/94033ee6c2cef93fc1b1637b727c902a/sudo-mesh-communications // Events Trello: https://trello.com/invite/b/Y3XfDK85/2b6fcb4fa92788609692a53a96fb4614/peoples-open-events

  • byoi feedback - https://peoplesopen.net/pad/p/byoi
  • aspiration tech dev summit
    • scott - it was really cool. format was different - everyone came together to decide what to talk about - super different from everyone talking about their company. though it did suck when you get sucked into what seems like a general topic and is really a specific (e.g. wordpress) topic in disguise. it was good networking for companies that are less corporate and more into grassroots efforts.
    • null: i met a ton of people. the main idea on their website is to meet new people. if you're around a bunch of people you already know then that's not against the rules but frowned upon. nothing's like 100% perfect but there was a lot of awesome people talking about awesome things and for the most part everyone's open and really good to talk to. people have the same kinds of ideas so they go to the same topics. there was the sudo mesh demo that i demoed. i actually think i learned a bit from doing the demo. there was a share your skill thing. i ran into someone who was a reverse-engineer and she already knew about what i was talking about. got some advice on riots.
  • benny: our demo was a bit disorganized/unplanned and while we had plans to do a technical demo we had very little time for the demo and ended up just pointing at the hardware and talking about it, which i think was more useful for people. i was really impressed with how gunnar the facilitator facilitated the whole thing.15 people would say a little bit about what they wanted to talk about and gunnar would remember all of it and expound on all of it and reframe it and joke about it.
  • scott: yeah i was probably most impressed by him
  • sudo mesh was mentioned a lot
  • scott: we were one of the few sponsors who were there
  • benny: one thing i noticed about us is that none of us said we were part of peoplesopen.net when we made our introductions
  • scott: but it wasn't really what we were asked to say
  • benny: your name and why you were there
  • null - going to get in contact with someone I met at conference from nycmesh
  • juul - also you can still buy them from groupon $20 per

Nico's Visit + LibreMesh

  • juul - I'm excited to maybe at some point in the future switch over to use libremesh. One thing right now is that we have pretty different use-cases -- they're primarily focused on rural communities -- nico was surprised that half of our nodes share their internet.
  • juul - Anyway, I think it's a good idea to switch (others might disagree). Our firmware has made some progress but has also stagnated some. They have a larger team dedicated to maintaining it. Our firmware does some things theirs does not, and vice versa. One question is, if we were to switch, when and how?
  • benny - My 2 cents is that we should find out how to maintain ongoing communication with their team. Maybe by doing that we can have a say in what they're doing. If they see that we're willing to join forces they might be more willing to focus on features we care about. And it would just be cool to unite! Working with Nico was really fun!
  • null - (points out not spreading ourselves too thin)
  • benny - they have a bunch of resources for learning/teaching - when nico comes back we should have him run one of their workshops and see how they work. I think we have a lot to learn from how they run workshops. We're really aligned with their "geek free" mission, but they're better at it IMO.
  • juul - I'm also excited about the LibreRouter. (sorry juul i zoned out and didnt take notes here -- can you summarize ur thoughts?) (some details about how the libremesh first boot works -- configures based on nearby nodes in the area)

? (group that holds trainings for disaster preparedness)

  • scott - do you have space on any of your antennas where we might be able to put a...
  • tyler: for the firestations i don't know what the procedure is for putting up new equipment, but that's also why i'm here. i might need someone to come down to one of our meeting an gather and discuss some of the implementations that could happen between the two groups, especially when i look at disaster.radio which could be very useful during a crisis, if there's a way to pull off getting that information directly to the first responders that might be an even more direct way.
scott: it would br really useful to be able to bounce off the hiills
* tyler: we have gear at a location but don't own it and are sharing it with a bunch of folks and kinda just have a mutual agreement with the landlord there and most of what's up there is cell phone related stuff so i'm afarid if it's not VHF or UHF it might cause interference. these are all questions that could be talked about, well if not during our meetings i might want to bring some members over during next weeks sudomesh meeting. a couple of hams and i have a presentation we're putting together for december 1. researching upcoming technologies for emergency comms and digital comms in general for amateyr radio and how our club could advance.
* benny: where are you giving this presentation?
* tyler: oakland fire station 1
  • juul - is it open to anyone
  • tyler - yeah it's open to everyone
  • juul - is there an inverse correlation between the age of your members and the frequencies over which they choose to communicate?
  • tyer - maybe we could deploy an arden node here?

Internal Logistics / Finance

Internal Logistics & Bureaucracy Trello: https://trello.com/invite/b/LzVQlW3X/1bb8bd543c8633688175365d2554c2c2/internal-logistics-bureaucracy-brainstorms

  • nada

Next Sunday

We host office hours every Sunday from 1-3pm in Sudo Room, and often arrange a rooftop node mount. juul, null, seth - village internet?

Action Items

  • Contact potential node in East Bay Hills (deep east) (Jenny)
  • Follow up w/ paxio (juul)
  • Schedule a meeting to reflect on BYOI feedback?
  • Measure power output of our gear
    • then e-mail jonah (benny)

Breakout Groups

At the end of the meeting, break out into small groups to hack on or discuss specific topics.

  • measure power output
    • 180W during boot-up, 160W during stress --cpu 2

Last Meeting Notes

End of Meeting