Kickstarting Meshnets with WRT54Gs

[Brandon Wooldridge]

Preliminary research indicates setting up a meshnet with the ever
present WRT54Gs is actually quite easy. This was literally the first
result when I typed in "meshnets wrt54g" into Google.

http://www.leger.ca/pages/CHAMPLAIN/meshnet.htm

From the site:
"The Linksys WRT54G router can be used to create an ad hoc wireless
network, Because of it'sd use of an Open Source Linux operating
system, it can be customized and adapted as an Access Point (AP) to
provide an inexpensive solution. Of course such a home device does not
have the robustness of an industrialized commercial solution, but for
the cost it's an interesting solution. Because of this low cost it
could be considered to create a free metropolitain network. This is
what is presented here."

Chris, maybe it's time to put those old blue boxes to use?

[chris_hive13]

i used WDS in openWRT a few years ago and i found it to be realy
unreliable. in WDS, the neighbors for each node are entered
statically and don't deal well with disappearing nodes. when one node
loses the link to its neighbor it can be tough to get them all talking
again, especially clients that are several hops from the AP.

this is why self healing is a big deal, and why dynamic ad-hoc
protocols like b.a.t.m.a.n were invented: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B.A.T.M.A.N.

a novel approach to the dynamic routing problem is to stop approaching
it from a layer 3/routing point of view, and instead treat it like a
layer 2/switching problem: http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki