Open-Mesh developments

[Ian]

Hi All,

Really good to have news from both sides of the Atlantic as regards
all the work going on over the Christmas break.. Full praise for all
for work done as the pace speeds up in this OSS development. News in
shows much bug swatting, developing etc over the Christmas
"break" ..... we await the next upgrade...... I am sure Mike/Antonio
will post fuller details when it is loaded. Well Done! Gents!

Seasonal Greetings to all

Ian

[Ian]

Work continues at quite a pace!! Certainly Antonio and Mike have been
hard at it over Christmas! R2 now loaded and under trials..

Latest from Mike gives us an insight as to how we maybe can expect
progress.....

short term:

You will be able to enter a list of mac addresses to an ACL list.
These will be the only addresses allowed in. On top of this, we will
have a white list (users won't get a splash screen) and black list
(user will be temporarilty disallowed).

A user can be both on the ACL list and on the black list and they
won't get in. So you can use the black list to block mis-behaving
users and simply removed them from this list when they promise to
behave.

Medium term:

This an automatic black list based upon bandwidth usage. Once a user
hits their "session limit" (transferred data for this login session),
they will automatically be added to a "temporary" black list that will
block them for the rest of the session. A session is whatever time
duration you set between splash pages. So, if you set a session of
say, 24 hours, and a limit of 100mb for 24 hours, then if a user hits
100mb at hour 2, they will be blocked for the next 22 hours, then it
starts over.

Longer term:

Even longer term, we plan to implement smarter throttling. This will
give users a certain (admin settable) "burst" time - a time where they
are very minimally throttled. After they download so much during that
time, they throttle down to a much lower rate (also admin settable).
So, for example, a user could get very high bandwidth for 10 seconds
of continuous download. At that point, they would throttle down to a
very low rate. This is dynamic and per-user so you never need to do
anything: Heavy users are automatically throttled to a very low
rate. Once they stop this heavy usage, a few seconds later they get
full speed again.


....... Testing today shows that the updated nodes are meshing well...
white list is available..... we watch and test with interest!

Best Wishes and a Happy New Year to all

Ian

[Bill]

Further to a conversation i had with Mike earlier today, i received
this very informative email outlining the future for open-mesh.com
which i think many of you will enjoy reading.


Michael Burmeister-Brown Wrote:

Our pledge is to run with the ORIGINAL meraki model (but even more
open):

1. The open-mesh.com backend server will very soon become open-source.
We will do this is a way that gives local control for those that want
it
while providing complete plug and play capability for those that just
want something that works out of the box. It is written in straight
forward php/mysql so is easily installed on any lamp box and easily
customised without requiring specialised skills. We want to work with
non-commercial local community groups to establish locally owned and
managed open-mesh.com servers throughout the world.

2. We will only support 'open' hardware. If open-source drivers are
not
available, we won't use it. We want anyone to be able to recompile
the
firmware to meet local needs.
3. We will continue active development of the backend server. Some
things that are in the works:

A). User control: list users, white/black list control including
dynamic throttling and preset usage limits so you can automate the
throttling/black list process.

B). Tie in to many content-driven splash page / user management
systems
including google / yahoo, etc. You'll be able to easily customise the
splash page, add useful content, add users, etc using their tools.

C). Expand the graphs on the overview page extensively.

D). Tie in to other billing systems to support worldpay / paypal etc.
We
won't develop our own like meraki, but want to allow others with these
systems to plug into our open system. This gives network admins
maximum
flexibility to use the systems they already know, use and support.

E). Establish local 'open-mesh.com' servers run by community groups
through out the world. Would you / Ian, etc be interested in helping
get this off the ground in the UK?

In short, we want to provide more than a meraki 'pro' at less than
meraki 'std' pricing. And do it in a way that embraces the work of
others rather than excluding them.

Our mission is to never again have our community wireless projects
depend upon third parties such as Linksys, Meraki, etc. We are
working
hard with Freifunk and others through out the world to secure open
firmware, hardware, and management services and promote those who
support this vision.

I hope this info helps with some background.

I will likely be travelling to Europe end Jan or early Feb and would
love to meet with your group and see how we could support your efforts
in the UK.

Mike