Freifunkblog

Fred Chien from Taiwan has published some results on the LXDE blog about his current work for the LXNetworkManager and I am happy to present some screenshots here. Besides having Fred working on code related to wireless networks, the goal of teaming up with him in the Freifunk Google Summer of Code is to bring him closer in touch with the global free wireless community. For a long time we are looking for an easier to use and faster lightweight network manager, that supports freifunk community networks. Through his previous work Fred has shown that he shares those goals and that he is eager and able to get things done. Also we can be sure, that he will continue working on the code once the summer of code funding is finished. The rewritten LXNM already supports wireless connection settings and we are discussing at the moment different ways to define standards for wireless freifunk networks. So, I am looking forward to an exciting ongoing development. Thanks for a great job this summer, Fred!

Detailed description of the current status provided by Fred: LXNM (Lightweight Network Manager) is working now after a long time for development. If you often check the news of SVN, you can notice that the next generation of LXNM has already supported wireless connection setting, also it has many feature as old version of LXNM. The new implementation and protocol defination seems to work well at least there is no bug of old version of LXDE had that no Access Point was scanned always.

As a network manager, wireless is the basic feature, but only the feature is not enough for new internet devices. To be a full function network connection utility, it must provide most popular methods of internet connection service something’s like 3G(HSPDA), PPPoE, dial…etc. And also we can expect WiMAX will be coming soon, so supporting WiMAX maybe important and necessary in the feature as well.

So far most network connections methods need to use PPP(Point-to-Point Protocol) to make connection, so we must try to focus on how’s PPP working and how to integrate PPP stuffs with our program. Fortunately, Most of operating system was using pppd to handle the ppp connections, it seems to be a standard we can consider. If we know how to get pppd immediate status, it will be easy to integrate PPP with our utility for us.

Regarding pppd implementation, it uses a tdb(samba database) to store current connection information(IP, interface, deivce, gateway, dns…etc) in system folder as root. Thus we need to read the file to get network status and the relationship between modem(eg, 3G modem, general modem) and network interface(eg, ppp0, ppp1…). Because of pppd is a user-space implementation as well as it doesn’t have library to provide serial APIs to let us be easy to operate its own stuffs, LXNM must direct open the tdb file. The problem is that pppd will update the tdb file anytime, it is possible that database be modified when LXNM is just reading the file. When it is happened, LXNM will get incorrect information or access failed to cause crazy crash. For solving this bug, we do some to check more information details which is from tdb. After some hard works, right now the issue was solved already.

Besides, the 3G support which is most important feature people concern. LXNM will try to use AT command to control 3G(HSDPA) modem to implement the connection handler, it can provide more information(ISP, Service Location, current area…etc) for your SIM Card with AT command. Some developers suggest us to research the implementation of Modem Manager Project for helping development.

Now we are working on this part which is that dialing with 3G modem, but there were also some weird problems we got. More details about those issues will be explained at blog next time.

List of Access Points on LXNM

Scanning for Access Points on LXNM

Links

* Source code: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=180858&package_id=...
* LXDE: http://lxde.org
* Fred Chien: http://fred-zone.blogspot.com/search/label/LXDE

What happened to the application of the freifunk community (Blog entry) for the Google Summer of code? Well, as you can guess by now, unfortunately we did not get it.. even though we were close. I had asked Leslie Hawthorn and she wrote us back the following lines:

"I know OpenWRT and like them. We simply couldn't accept everyone. You folks made our short list if that helps. I can give you more feedback if you send me the URL for your ideas list. Is there a way Google can help you beyond Summer of Code? Leslie Hawthorn"

We had some nice ideas. Our intention was to serve as an umbrella for all the freifunk projects here, but maybe we can join the program next year. We still have the ideas pages, which is probably also intresting for developers who want to join freifunk projects in the future.

Some of the project ideas were/are:

• Multimedia Streaming in Mesh Networks / Porting Obamp to C++
• Passive + Active Measurement in Mesh Networks / Porting OpenIMP probes to OpenWRT
• Traffic Flow Visualization / IPFIX DataSource for freimap
• Mesh Node Status Monitoring / SNMP DataSource for freimap
• Service Discovery in Mesh Networks / Avahi DataSource for freimap
• Service Control Module for freimap
• Topology visualization / B.A.T.M.A.N and olsrd routing decision recovery for freimap
• Database output for freimap
• Antenna placement information elements in freifunk map data
• Search in Wireless Mesh Networks - Yacy
• Search in Wireless Mesh Networks - Nutch/Lucene
• Peer-to-peer file sharing applications in Wireless Mesh Networks
• Developing a Freifunk Theme for CMS
• VoIP phoning in Freifunk Mesh Networks
• Porting Freifunk to EeePC
• Freifunk Webinterface for OpenWrt Kamikaze

( http://wiki.freifunk.net/Ideas)

Some fantastic work was done during the last days working with some great folks to get an application for freifunk networks for the Google Summer of Code out. Our goal is to get new students excited about the idea of free networks and to join us in the development process and contribute code. We have formed an international group to get this application done. Besides talking to our developers in Germany I have been busily speaking to ninux.org from Italy, guifi.net from Spain and France Wireless in order to recruit our most talented and active developers as mentors for the programme. Not everyone was able to give me a "yes" yet, but we have formed a great team to start off and we are happy to welcome even more prospective mentors from other free wireless networks from around the world.

Our starting team of mentors is:

• Sven-Ola Tücke (http://ff-firmware.sf.net, Freifunk Firmware)
• Alexander Morlang (Alx, p2p in freifunk networks, Fraunhofer, Germany)
• Thomas Hirsch (freimap, Fraunhofer, Germany)
• Felix Fietkau (OpenWRT, Europe)
• Frithjof Hammer (Freifunk BNO, Germany)
• Harald Schioeberg (t-labs, Germany)
• Ramon Navarro Bosch (Guifi.net, Spain, former GSoC Plone student)
• Xavi Martinez (Guifi.net, Spain)
• Aaron Kaplan (OLSR.org, Austria)
• Francesco Saverio Proto (ninux.org, Italy)
• Mikolas Bingemer (Freifunk-Hannover.de, Germany, head of Software development of medium sized enterprise)
• Jo-Philipp Wich (leipzig.freifunk.net, Freifunk Leipzig Firmware, Germany)
• Andrea Detti is full researcher and adjoined Professor at the School of Telecommunications Engineering of the University of Rome "Tor Vergata" (Italy)

The backup organization administrator is Mario Behling (me), (Freifunkblog, perspektive89.com, Germany)

My idea is that we would have mentors for students who would maybe even be able to meet them locally. As we find already more than 170 free wireless communities worldwide on the global freifunk newswire, there is a chance we could do this in a lot of cases.

Freifunk serves as an umbrella for all the local projects here. We use the Freifunk-Wiki for our coordination. We started to collect ideas for possible student projects here already as well. Currently there are:

• Multimedia Streaming in Mesh Networks / Porting Obamp to C++
• Passive + Active Measurement in Mesh Networks / Porting OpenIMP probes to OpenWRT
• Traffic Flow Visualization / IPFIX DataSource for freimap
• Mesh Node Status Monitoring / SNMP DataSource for freimap
• Service Discovery in Mesh Networks / Avahi DataSource for freimap
• Service Control Module for freimap
• Topology visualization / B.A.T.M.A.N and olsrd routing decision recovery for freimap
• Database output for freimap
• Antenna placement information elements in freifunk map data
• Search in Wireless Mesh Networks - Yacy
• Search in Wireless Mesh Networks - Nutch/Lucene
• Peer-to-peer file sharing applications in Wireless Mesh Networks
• Developing a Freifunk Theme for CMS
• VoIP phoning in Freifunk Mesh Networks
• Porting Freifunk to EeePC
• Freifunk Webinterface for OpenWrt Kamikaze
• more ideas are welcome...