[mesh-dev] Web admin of roof to roof nodes [another ramble]

[Marc Juul]

We haven't talked about what to do for web admin of the roof to roof nodes.

The roof to roof 5 ghz nodes should probably just have babel on both wifi
and ethernet interface and the same IP assigned to both interfaces. That's
basically it for now right?

I believe we've been thinking that anywhere that has a roof to roof node,
and isn't just a relay point, must also have a 2.4 ghz node with the normal
sudowrt firmware and that the rooftop 5 ghz node plugs into the 2.4 ghz
node via ethernet.

In the longer run we should figure out how to tell a 2.4 ghz node that it
"owns" one or more 5 ghz rooftop nodes, and query those nodes for
connectivity information (link status, signal strength, packet loss, link
latency) such that it can be reported to the node owner via the 2.4 ghz
node web admin interface.

If we put a web admin interface on the 5 ghz rooftop nodes at all, then I
imagine that it would be very singular in purpose: It would show a
live-updating feed of only other 5 ghz peoplesopen.net-node2node nodes +
their signal strength and let the user select which node to connect to (of
course using self-signed SSL and a node-unique password).

We want to make it easy for people to deploy a 5 ghz node, so accessing
this web interface during node install should be as easy as possible.

If we're really clever, we could make a tiny fake dhcp server for these
nodes that sends out periodic DHCPDISCOVER packets and listens for ANY
other DHCP server traffic on the ethernet interface. If it sees traffic
from another DHCP server, then it does nothing until the physical ethernet
connection has been severed and reconnected. If it sees a DHCPDISCOVER and
no response, then on the e.g. third DHCPDISCOVER it gives the client a
lease. This can always be a lease for the same IP, since its only purpose
is to give a single lease to a laptop that's been hooked directly into the
node. The dnsmasq running on the node will resolve e.g. node.sudomesh.org
to the node's IP, such that accessing this "node install helper" web app
will be as easy as plugging a laptop into the node and opening
node.sudomesh.org in a browser.

Planning for potentially doing this means only this: We give each 5 ghz
roof to roof node two IP addresses instead of one (which reminds me that I
need to add some stuff to meshnode-database to make it possible for
makenode to request single/multiple IPs instead of complete subnets).

btw I think we should consider not using my.node and similar domains since
chrome and safari don't understand those domains unless prefaced with
http(s):// (though safari at least understands .local).

It could just be pplsopen.net (and peoplesopen.net and all the other
domains), but maybe we can buy something short using one of those
newfangled top-level domains? We should own the domain so we don't block
someone elses domain from resolving.

-- 
marc/juul
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