Fwd: [B.A.T.M.A.N.] Alfred Open Beta

[Wayne Abroue]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Simon Wunderlich <simon.wu...@s2003.tu-chemnitz.de>
Date: Sun, May 19, 2013 at 12:50 PM
Subject: [B.A.T.M.A.N.] Alfred Open Beta
To: b.a.t...@lists.open-mesh.org


To those of you who actively follow the recent discussions it may come to no
big surprise that it was decided to remove the vis functionality from the
batman-adv kernel module in a not so distant future (with the next
compatibility bump). There always has been a debate whether or not such
functionality belongs into the kernel or not. The in-kernel solution bears the
disadvantage of being rather inflexible because every change has to go through
the official Linux channels. With the growing interest in flooding the network
with arbitrary data in addition to the visualization data realizing a solution
in user-space became the obvious choice.

A new, more general user-space daemon which takes over the old vis
functionality and much more, called A.L.F.R.E.D. (Almighty Lightweight Fact
Remote Exchange Daemon) came to life. Alfred is capable of distributing
information over your mesh network in a decentralized fashion, for example
graph information for vis, but also any other data which appears to be useful
- like hostnames, phone books, administration information, DNS information,
the local weather forecast, etc while requiring (almost) zero configuration.

As the development on the core functionality has been finished and alfred works
(at least on the developers boxes), we would like to call for an open beta!
There are bleeding edge downloads and an OpenWRT feed available [1]. Please
try alfred and report bugs, send patches and inform us about your experiences.
Alfred will be release along with the next batman-adv release.

Happy routing,

The B.A.T.M.A.N. team

[1] http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/open-mesh/wiki/Alfred#Download

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[Song, Stephen]

Hi Wayne,

Saw this this morning.  Not only a great way to keep /etc/bat-hosts files in sync but also a phone directory.  This has tremendous potential for making local phone meshes easier to manage.

Cheers... Steve

P.S.  Much as the name BATMAN is a little irritating because it is hard to google it without pulling up half of hollywood, Alfred is the perfect name for this program, the discreet information butler :-)

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Steve Song

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http://manypossibilities.net
http://villagetelco.org

[Douglas Heckaman]

Hmm, that means instead of dialing other MPs via ip like we do now, it would lookup the dialed number via Alfred and obtain the correct sip URL to reach that number? That would facilitate the use of ipv6 too... No dhcp server needed and no static ips, everyone can communicate with each other right out of the box... Just set the phone number. That would also allow direct dialing between fully routed subnets, as long as you can maintain a single Alfred 'instance' across all your meshes. Interesting stuff.

I'm not a developer, but I'm more of a networking/sysadmin type of guy... If I wanted to build a mesh network to test Meshpotato network designs, or just batman itself, what would the best thing to get? A bunch of those cheap tplink routers?

[T Gillett]

Hi Douglas

The TP Link devices are a nice way to test mesh network designs.

While they don't have the telephony hardware built in like an MP, you can plug in a USB with Asterisk and use the softphone functionality to mimic an MP.

Some devices that I have found useful are:

WR842ND (2.4GHz, 8MB Flash, 32MB RAM, 1xUSB, 5x Eth,12Volt) $40
    http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wr842nd

WDR4300 (2.4 & 5 GHz dual radio, 8MB Flash, 128MB RAM, 2xUSB, 5x Eth, 12Volt) $100
    http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wdr4300

And if you want a small, USB powered device for portability:
MR3020 (2.4GHz, 4MB Flash, 32MB RAM, 1xUSB, 1x Eth, USB powered) $30
    http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-mr3020

A similar device with built in Li battery:
MR3040 (2.4GHz, 4MB Flash, 32MB RAM, 1xUSB, 1x Eth, USB powered) $45
    http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-mr3040

Terry

[Abdul Hakeem]

Hello,

 

Does anyone know any device with 256MB RAM and or 1x or 2x mini-pci( e) interface ?

Regards,

Abdul Hakeem

[Steve Song]

Hi Abdul,

You could try an Alix board

http://www.pcengines.ch/alix.htm

I have the http://www.pcengines.ch/alix2d13.htm and have been impressed with it so far.

Regards... Steve

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--
Steve Song

+1 902 529 0046

http://villagetelco.org

[NicoEchániz]

On 05/19/2013 06:25 PM, T Gillett wrote:
> Hi Douglas
>
> The TP Link devices are a nice way to test mesh network designs.
>
> While they don't have the telephony hardware built in like an MP, you
> can plug in a USB with Asterisk and use the softphone functionality to
> mimic an MP.
>
> Some devices that I have found useful are:
>
> WR842ND (2.4GHz, 8MB Flash, 32MB RAM, 1xUSB, 5x Eth,12Volt) $40
> http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wr842nd
>
> WDR4300 (2.4 & 5 GHz dual radio, 8MB Flash, 128MB RAM, 2xUSB, 5x Eth,
> 12Volt) $100
> http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wdr4300

I'd add the WDR3500 as a cheaper multi-band router option if you won't
be using Gigabit ethernet. It's also easier to make them PoE enabled[0]

cheers,
NicoEch�niz

[0] http://blog.altermundi.net/article/diy-poe-enabled-100mbit-router/

[Gui Iribarren]

On 05/19/2013 07:01 PM, Song, Stephen wrote:
> Hi Wayne,
>
> Saw this this morning. Not only a great way to keep /etc/bat-hosts
> files in sync but also a phone directory. This has tremendous potential
> for making local phone meshes easier to manage.

Just a quick update on this,
i compiled and installed alfred, (which, by the way, was recently
officially released) and during my tests it worked as expected,
it's really small in size (8KiB),
and it doesn't seem to have any size limit on the data propagated, [like
bmx6-sms-plugin currently does, an analogous tool from another routing
protocol].

The "api" feels a bit awkward, specially the id number thing (alfred -s
64 "data") but it's just a detail.

I started to write a script to autopopulate bat-hosts in lua, but lua
still beats me, and i was impatient to see bat-hosts discovering each
others :P

so in 5 minutes and 5 lines of regexps
https://github.com/libre-mesh/lime-packages/blob/38471b7944aefe0da48f9083e072719b984fc9a6/packages/alfred-mod-bat-hosts/files/usr/share/alfred/bat-hosts.sh

i ran the script on 3 different routers, with alfred daemon, and voila!

root@marisa:~# sh /tmp/bat-hosts.sh
root@marisa:~# cat /tmp/bat-hosts
66:70:02:3d:85:0b marisa_wlan0-1

56:e6:fc:b9:cb:39 nicoyjesi_wlan0-1

92:f6:52:bb:ec:59 nogal_wlan0-1

So, i'll now sit down and finish lua script, and try to make a simple
framework to add more small lua "plugins" like this, looking forward
propagating phone directories like you said, etc :)

Cheers!

Gui

[joshu...@griffithuni.edu.au]

Hey Gui!

If I could get Alfred on one of my nodes, I could write that for you pretty easily. Was it hard?

This is something we need hahaha. So if lua is lost on you, throw it at me!

"I started to write a script to autopopulate bat-hosts in lua, but lua 
still beats me, and i was impatient to see bat-hosts discovering each 
others :P"

[Gui Iribarren]

On 08/05/2013 01:23 AM, joshu...@griffithuni.edu.au wrote:
> Hey Gui!
>
> If I could get Alfred on one of my nodes, I could write that for you
> pretty easily. Was it hard?
> This is something we need hahaha. So if lua is lost on you, throw it at me!

Great to hear Joshua, that'd be really much appreciated, and probably
Simon will be interested too.
I imagined something minimal, like cron "run-parts", something that
periodically (less than 10mins, which is alfred TTL) scans a directory
and runs all scripts found there.
heh, now that i think about it, i could simply use said cronjob :)

what are you using the unix sockets for? just a particular script, or
something related to this "framework"?

btw, i saw you already got alfred on your nodes, and having fun, so the
link to a precompiled .ipk is a little bit too late :P

but, if anyone else wants to play without the hassle of compiling, grab
a copy for free! ;)

opkg install
http://chef.mesh.altermundi.net/downloads/r36140/ar71xx/packages/alfred_2013.3.0-0_ar71xx.ipk

gui