i386 ROBIN problems

[Philip G]

First, thanks to all those working on robin & open-mesh, Antonio,
Mike, etc; its coming along a treat.

As many of you will know robin is built using the openwrt linux system
which also has a generic intel target. Using this target and starting
with the .config file diligently supplied by antonio, and some
guidance from the now named 'compiling' svn I managed to build an
image which booted on real intel hardware.

But my problem was that although I was able to fashion my own openwrt
makefile for the specific version of batmand (rv780 at the time, pre
r2) based on the outdated one contained in kamikaze, I don't know
enough about which ping version / source code was used to build the
binary of ping supplied in the robin builds via svn. So I have ended
up with the ping from buisybox which I assume is inadequate and
normally replaced by the robin one.

Sorry if this is a silly question but a load of this stuff is new to
me. But I am not new to linux, which helped.

I have probably overlooked something simple but I think what I need is
an openwrt make file for the ping used in robin such that I can
duplicate the current r2 robin in intel (with updates disabled mind).
Antonio (hello, and thanks) has supplied the one for nodogsplash (as
the one in kamikaze, like the batmand one, makes older versions).
Perhaps we could gather a complete set of openwrt makefiles for the
binaries in robin svn, ie batmand, libiksemel.so (I used the one in
kamikaze (v1.3)), and ping.

Apart from the above & making the update system architecture aware I
think with effort and the use of known working models of atheros based
wifi cards this could be made into a complimentary platform for robin.

Thanks in advance for any help anyone can offer.

[Ian]

Hi Philip,

Is this Batman specific or Robin specific.... who needs contacting??

Yes personally feel a great idea to get Batman/tobin onto all our old
Compaqs & Dells

Trust someone can jump in with some thoughts???

[Ian]

Reply from Antonio re "ping"

.....I remember a problem about a "ping" version but I'm not sure. If
so, the ping coming with robin is a simple ping which has -R option
enabled while busybox-ping (coming from kamikaze) doesn't have that
option........


I hope that helps Philip.....

[Philip G]

Ciao! Antonio

Grazie for the ping help but we really need:-

*********
your openwrt makefiles and diffs for your svn binaries:-
-- ping
-- libiksemel.so
-- batmand

So that we can compile for i386.

Otherwise we can not know what source code you use!

We have about 200 i386 nodes in uk in need of robin.
*********

Most convenient if available in your svn repository like the
nodogsplash
makefile.

Grazie infinite for all your good work and we look forward to trying
on i386.

[Philip G]

Hello all and Ciao! Antonio.

I have managed to build an intel (compaq sff + cm9 + pci adapter)
version of robin r2-jack which successfully upgraded itself to r2-c271
via open-mesh. This node and another like it also appear to mesh
successfully with an existing meraki-mini gateway (r2-c271). A
wireless client of the intel node was then able to browse the
internet.

I have done very little testing of this intel robin system but have
noticed some issues which I would like some help with.

First what I did:-
-work arounds for the binary issues mentioned in last post of mine:-
-- ping -- I don't yet know how to make the proper ping within openwrt
so went with buisybox ping so no -R.
-- libiksemel.so -- I just used the vanilla 1.3 version included with
kamikazi as I don't know which version is in robin.
-- batmand -- I used vanilla 0.3-beta-rv828 source code compiled using
a modified version of kamikazi's batman makefile.

I used the nodogsplash makefile from svn compiling.

Added the limited wired network drivers via top level make
menuconfig. Haven't tried adding more by specifying in kernel config
yet.
Added ext2 & ext3 (not really needed) plus the ide driver and of
course changed the target to generic intel.
All config was based on antonios 24 Dec .config file apart from
necessary arch and above changes.

Problems / Questions so far:-

1-- The batman version both in /etc/batman_version file and on open-
mesh is reported as "-" instead of "0.3-rv828", Antonio - do you patch
the vanilla source or is this something I have missed.

2-- The number of users column on open-mesh web sight is empty, not
even a 0.

3-- When registering the node with our test network on open-mesh I
used the ip, the mac displayed on the web sight node list is then that
of the wired ethernet adapter. I hope this is not a problem. It
appears the meraki-mini has same mac for both wired and wifi devices.

4-- The upgrade (jack to c271) didn't seem to involve any binaries so
all OK I think, but in future there may be packages; what is the best
way to deal with this. Can we have a subdir on open-mesh so then
intel builds can be hardcoded to that dir via "option updt_srv" in /
etc/config/general. That way the intel version of the upgrade script
and files can be kept seperate. Or is this bad design. Any Ideas
anyone.

5-- Is the vanilla 1.3 version of libiksemel.so going to be OK, what
version is used in robin and is it patched.

6-- Does it matter that ping is without -R, other than for manual
diagnosis.

Thanks / Grazie all and Antonio.

[Richie Jarvis]

Hi Philip,

Excellant work! Well done - I'd be very interested in sharing the build
tree your using - do you have a repository I can grab it from?

Cheers,

Richie

[Philip G]

Thanks Richie, most generous.

"do you have a repository" you ask, nothing so fancy I'm affraid,
perhapse we should set one up.

The build tree I used is that of Kamikaze trunk revision 9504 as
indicated by Antonio's .config on 24 Dec
https://svn2.hosted-projects.com/ansanto/robin/branches/compiling/
This also gets the nodogsplash dir to replace the one you get via the
extra Kamikaze packages that end up in feeds/url, see below.

Please note I am a beginner at most of this and have to go through the
whole process again from scratch soon and clarify / document.

I checked it out using:-
svn co -r9504 https://svn.openwrt.org/openwrt/trunk/
to this I added the extra packages as the above only gets the core
openwrt build tree and we need several of the additional packages.

make package/symlinks

The above line should get the additional packages and make links in
package dir to where it downloads them which is in feeds/url-of-
source. This didn't work for me straight away and ended up trying a
few other ways so bit unclear here.

I then followed Antonio's directions except for the necessary
differences I mentioned in my last post here. It took quite some time
to check differences required, and available options so maybe you
would like the .config (which has all the build selections I made in
it) that I ended up with. You may think different options are
required. I based my selections as closely as I could to Antonios.

Note that because Antonio supplies binary batmand & libiksemel.so they
are not selected in his .config but I have selected them because I
compiled using the vanilla libiksemel.so which came with extra
packages and modified the existing batmand makefile in Kamikazi to get
and compile vanilla 0.3-beta-rv828 (change version info and correct
the md5sum, then create an equivalent patch based on the kamikaze
one).

Note that when you copy Antonio's tag file set for the build of his
you intend to copy and past them into package/base-files/files you
must remove the 3 binaries he supplies as they are for mips arch (the
AP51) which wont do at all.

Haven't created a makefile for ping as I don't know how exactly yet;
so stuck with buisybox's ping which as Antonio pointed out has no -R
option enabled, awaiting Antonio's response as to the significance of
this (see my previous post).

I believe a make download will get all the required source (about
100MB) in one go before you start the compiling.

the:-
make
which will take ages, 2 to 2.5 hours on my antiquated hardware. It
compiles an entire build system from source and then uses that build
system to compile & build the requested openwrt linux system,
prioritising those files in package/base-files/files over it's own.

Hope this helps.

Please anyone correct me in any of this as I am no expert and just
having a go out of necessity as openwrt / robin / open-mesh system
looks great but need on intel arch.

phil_intel_robin_files.tar.gz in files of this group contains the
modified makefile and patch I used to build batman 0.3-bata-rv828 and
my second attempt at a .config for openwrt / intel robin. But please
note the problems I asked about in my last post and any help would be
greatly appreciated.

Hope this helps someone and is what you were after Richie. Lets keep
it all open I say.

[Philip G]

Many of the issues in this thread have now been addressed, or are out
of date. I am continuing a discussion on x86robin problems at
Antonio's forum at http://robin.forumup.it/ There are also more up to
date details within the latest x86robin build downloadable from
http://groups.google.co.uk/group/opensourcemesh?hl=en

Thanks.

On 9 Jan, 18:24, Philip G <phil.lx...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> Thanks Richie, most generous.
>
> "do you have a repository" you ask, nothing so fancy I'm affraid,
> perhapse we should set one up.
>
> The build tree I used is that of Kamikaze trunk revision 9504 as

> indicated by Antonio's .config on 24 Dechttps://svn2.hosted-projects.com/ansanto/robin/branches/compiling/

> This also gets the nodogsplash dir to replace the one you get via the
> extra Kamikaze packages that end up in feeds/url, see below.
>
> Please note I am a beginner at most of this and have to go through the
> whole process again from scratch soon and clarify / document.
>
> I checked it out using:-

> svn co -r9504https://svn.openwrt.org/openwrt/trunk/