[announce] Afrimesh Dashboard
Antoine van Gelder
It is with great pleasure that I get to make the initial announcement
of the Afrimesh dashboard project!
The ability to easily create an IP network in rural areas, developing
countries and disaster zones can significantly contribute to the
ability of people to communicate with each other.
Afrimesh builds on top of the most excellent B.A.T.M.A.N. project to
provide a simple management dashboard which enables network operators
to create and sustain a resilient communications network with a
minimum of fuss.
For the first release we are working hard towards simplifying common
tasks such as managing clients, maintaining network maps, monitoring
the network and managing bandwidth.
A live demo, managing the Afrimesh development testbed, can be viewed
at:
http://afrimesh.7degrees.co.za [1]
The current status of the software should still be considered pre-
alpha and it is only recommended that you check out the source code if
you are comfortable with a unix shell, know your way around a text
editor and are able to find and follow the badly written directions on
the wiki.
Binary packages are coming and will support the following environments:
* FreeBSD
* OpenWRT
* OpenWRT + R.O.B.I.N.
* Ubuntu
Future development direction will be largely determined by demand from
users but some ideas that have already come up include customer
billing management, telephony integration and support for building
social apps that connect mesh users with each other.
The source code is licensed under the New BSD License and is hosted at:
http://code.google.com/p/afrimesh
Finally, a very big thank you to each of Ajay, Chris, George & Kobus
from the Meraka Institute of the CSIR, Sebastian from wire.less.dk and
Steve from the Shuttleworth Foundation for the many contributions that
have made this project possible.
- antoine
[1] Yes, my routers have stickers on them. No, they are not at the
mapped locations but are in fact all on the same property. Yes,
transmitter power has been attenuated to a fraction of legally
permissible power output. No, you may not have my routers nor come
onto my property unless you have all of your paperwork in order!
--
http://7degrees.co.za
"Libré software for human education."
Steve Song
Sorry for the delayed reply. Have been on leave for a week. I have had
a look at the latest Afrimesh dashboard and it looks very cool.
Now I have a bunch of questions.
1) First, just to confirm, this is all running on a Linksys WRT or similar?
2) How is network authentication managed? If I have a 10 node network
with Afrimesh running on each one, how do I add nodes to the network?
Would the Afrimesh software just pick up on the BATMAN routing table?
How would that all work? Is there admin and user level authentication
for Afrimesh?
3) How modular is Afrimesh? For the Village Telco, we will want to add
in node information related to telephone calls, numbers, usage, etc.
How open is Afrimesh design to adding on things like this?
4) For me the gold standard in mesh management interfaces is still
OpenMesh/Meraki. I think Afrimesh comes pretty close in terms of how
the map interface is evolving but the network graphing is obviously not
there at least on a graphical level. Are there plans to integrate some
graphical representations of bandwidth use?
I have more questions but this seems like a good start. Looking forward
to more. Awesome work!
Cheers... Steve
Steve Song
Telecommunications Fellow, Shuttleworth Foundation
email: steve...@shuttleworthfoundation.org
work: +27 21 970 1220
mobile: +27 83 482 2088
skype: steve_l_song
blog: http://manypossibilities.net
twitter: stevesong
Antoine van Gelder
On 02 Mar 2009, at 17:22 , Steve Song wrote:
> Sorry for the delayed reply. Have been on leave for a week. I have
> had
> a look at the latest Afrimesh dashboard and it looks very cool.
>
> Now I have a bunch of questions.
> 1) First, just to confirm, this is all running on a Linksys WRT or
> similar?
The particular instance you're looking at on the web is installed on
an Inveneo box running FreeBSD but the systems in the development
testbed include:
. Linksys WRT54's (both older and newer versions of the hardware)
. A large cardboard box full of Meraki Minis
. A couple of Open-Mesh.com routers
. A 5ghz and a 2.4ghz Ubiquity Nanostation
. A couple of Macintoshes running OSX
. Various virtualized Linux & FreeBSD instances
The officially supported build targets will be OpenWRT, FreeBSD and
Ubuntu.
> 2) How is network authentication managed? If I have a 10 node network
> with Afrimesh running on each one, how do I add nodes to the network?
> Would the Afrimesh software just pick up on the BATMAN routing table?
> How would that all work? Is there admin and user level authentication
> for Afrimesh?
A mouthful of a question! Let me try to break it down into two chunks:
Adding nodes
------------
Network nodes and routes are picked up automatically by polling the
BATMAN visualization daemon.
Nodes can be positioned on the map either by the user as part of the
initial installation procedure or on the Network->Map by a mesh
administrator.
The way configuration information is managed also allows for initial
location and/or live location updates to occur via an embedded GPS
device.
Also, information about network routers & routes from sources _other_
than a BATMAN vis daemon can be transparently incorporated into the
system.
This allow us the option to, for example, add support for mapping an
OLSR mesh network or even non-mesh networks.
Authentication
--------------
There are two kinds of authentication we can talk about:
* Authorization to use the mesh management interface - currently I
have no access control configured on the demo page but unless anyone
wants to twist my rubber arm with a set of use-cases to support a more
complex schema I reckon we just use the built in authentication
mechanisms offered by the web server.
* Authorization for mesh clients to access the network and/or any
Internet gateways. This is currently managed by a standard Radius [1]
server which allows pretty much any kind of authentication schema you
can imagine as well as some you would rather not. I have also spoken
to Alberto about the possibility of writing a Radius authentication
module that would allow mesh nodes to authenticate against A2Billing.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RADIUS
> 3) How modular is Afrimesh? For the Village Telco, we will want to
> add
> in node information related to telephone calls, numbers, usage, etc.
> How open is Afrimesh design to adding on things like this?
The short answer to your question is: Highly and very.
The long answer is this:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
WARNING WARNING - Hairy technical details ahead - WARNING WARNING
Step 1: Configure/hack the system you want to interface with to output
data in XML or JSON [2] format. These days this is not as
hard as
it used to be.
Step 2: Tell Afrimesh what the data looks like, where it lives on the
network and how it relates to the other data it knows about.
This is all done in Javascript.
Step 3: Implement any views you wish on that data in standard
HTML/Javascript. (The Map view is also implemented as HTML &
Javascript so there is no special magic or server-side
mangling required to extend the range of information that
can be overlaid.)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The converse also applies where Afrimesh can itself act as a data
source and serve any of the information it aggregates about the
network in real-time.
> 4) For me the gold standard in mesh management interfaces is still
> OpenMesh/Meraki. I think Afrimesh comes pretty close in terms of how
> the map interface is evolving but the network graphing is obviously
> not
> there at least on a graphical level. Are there plans to integrate
> some
> graphical representations of bandwidth use?
There is a plan to integrate more graphing but there is also still a
conversation about whether it will be easier to rely on existing
software such as Nagios [3] or to build our own flashy Ajax-y ones [4]
or maybe even some kind of middle way which gives us a delicious user
experience without having to spend a lot of time re-inventing wheels.
One thing I would like to point out though is that if you look at the
Network->Health page you will see a live graph displaying Internet
traffic which is being pulled directly from my gateway router using
the standard SNMP [5] protocol.
So to give some perspective to our conversation, using afrimesh.js as
a foundation boils the implementation of that graph down to less than
twenty lines of very simple Javascript.
This holds true for any other data source on the network (SNMP or
otherwise)
Most importantly, the same technique which places the graph you're
looking at on a web page can also be used to embed it in the popups
from the Network->Map view.
Maybe a good pair of constructive questions to ask to help this
conversation along are:
1. Specifically, what kind of graphs would everyone like to see?
2. What, specifically, will being able to see each of those graphs
help you to do?
[3] http://www.nagios.org/
[4] See for e.g. http://code.google.com/p/flot/
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNMP
> I have more questions but this seems like a good start. Looking
> forward
> to more. Awesome work!
Thank you Steve :)
- antoine
Joe Bunefa
Hi,
I've fixed the add-repository command, and got the partner repository added. The apt-get install afrimesh-dashboard
call worked, but we're still getting the dashboard with the menu at the left, and nothing else. Please advise.
Thanks and will wait to hear from the group.
Cheers,
Joe