Wireless Freifunk Community Weekend Video Highlights from 2008

Another great series of interviews I filmed with Saverio from Ninux.org during the Wireless Community Weekend. Interviews with core contributors to the global Freifunk community:

* Kloschi from Leipzig about the future of Freifunk

* Bruno about the Horst tool developer

* Elektra from Berlin about the B.A.T.M.A.N. routing protocol and the goals of the developers.

Wireless Community Weekend 2008 Highlights from Saverio Proto on Vimeo.

Links:

* http://ninux.org
* http://leipzig.freifunk.net
* http://subsignal.org
* http://open-mesh.org
* http://perspektiv89.com
* http://wiki.freifunk.net/Wireless_Community_Weekend_2008

Video: Freie Kommunikation für Alle, WLan in Berlin

Bei YouTube tauchen immer mehr Videos zu Freifunk auf. Jetzt gibt es eins aus den frühen Tagen der Berliner Freifunk-Initiative mit Cven und Juergen Neumann über WLan und freie Netzein Berlin.

Das Video muss um 2003 herum entstanden sein.

Video von Roland Ibold, Julia Hoffmann und Christian Eichner
Titel: "Freie Kommunikation für Alle", WLan in Berlin

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDFrRGqI8d4

[via cuadrilla]

IPv6 and TLS capable network-superserver in Lua and C with HTTP and RPC Slave

The summer of code project of Steven Barth aka Cyrus is about planning and implementing an IPv6 and TLS capable
superserver in Lua as well as an HTTP/1.1-Server working on top of it
using the LuCI HTTP-Stack. This application will serve LuCI – the
Freifunk Firmware web user interface – and replace the currently used
slower CGI-solution without IPv6 and encryption support. Additionally
an RPC-Server will be built to allow remote administration of one or
more OpenWrt devices in a standardized way using JSON-RPC over TCP.

LuCId HttpD

The results of the summer work of Cyrus is pretty overwhelming. There is for example nixio, the new POSIX Lua library which will help us getting rid of the Lua 3rd
party library mess. And based on that there is also LuCId – which was described in the GSoC project. It brings us a new efficient HTTP-server. Some people may have
discovered that Cyrus already checked in things into trunk ocassionally. Also SSL support is working. Another nice new feature is native
support for creating wizards which will be used in the near future. The results of LuCId are already being tested in productive environments. They are performing well. Kernel mode
IO and TLS encryption function well. Special thanks for the achievements also go to John Crispin aka BLogic who is the mentor of Steve during the summer.

Links

Freifunk Videos: Wir sind das Netz – Geschichte, Philosophie und Praxis freier Netze

Funkfeuer Ischl hat einen Film über die Geschichte, Philosophie und Praxis freier Netze veröffentlicht.

Der Film bietet einen Einblick in die Funkfeuer Initiativen Graz und Bad Ischl und versucht den Unterschied zwischen kommerziellen Internetprovidern und Freien Netzwerken herauszuarbeiten. Gefördert wurde der Film durch das Land Oberösterreich im Rahmen des KUPF-Innovationstopfes.

2008 Schröckelsberger/Jankowski, 28 Minuten, deutsch, 2009

Der Film steht für nicht kommerziellen Gebrauch in voller Qualität zum Download zur Verfügung

* Bittorrent Download
* mp4 Video: HTTP Download / HTTP Mirror Berlin
* ogv Video: HTTP Download / HTTP Mirror Berlin

Freifunk Google Summer of Code Project LXNM (Lightweight Network Manager) current results

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!

Lightweight Network Manager

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=268419
* LXDE: http://lxde.org
* Fred Chien: http://fred-zone.blogspot.com/search/label/LXDE

 

Freifunk & Ninux Video – Coproduction from the Archives

I just found an interview that I filmed during the Wireless Community Weekend 2008 online. The interview was done by Saverio from Ninux.org with Kloschi and Tetzlav from Leipzig and gives us a few insights where Freifunk is heading. Enjoy!

Wireless Community Weekend 2008: Interview with kloschi at C-Base Berlin from Saverio Proto on Vimeo.

Vom Loboist und freien WLAN

Wie
funktioniert Lobbyismus und wie kann man das selbst machen? Sascha Lobo
erklärt die Funktion der "Strippenzieher" im Hintergrund und das
Funktionieren des Lobbyismus im Selbstversuch: Sein Ziel: Freies
Internet für alle, überall und immer! Sein Weg: der Freifunk führt zum Ziel. Seht
selbst:
direkt auf AVE oder bei ARTE
 

Nächster Sendetermin:

Freitag, 31. Juli 2009 um 09.55 Uhr

auf arte

Status of Service Discovery for Freimap development

An update on one of our Google summer of code projects: Service Discovery for Freimap. Stefano Pilla from Ninux.org is working on the project. We have widened the project a bit. He is now also working on porting freimap to IDE like
Netbeans. This will make it easier in the future to implement new graphic map views.

Service Discovery works fine and at the moment Stefano is testing a prototype and working already on documentation. During the project he got in touch with the creator of JmDNS, Rick Blair. JmDNS is an implementation of mdns for Java. He also started an exchange with the creator of JXMapKit
(SwingLabs – Josh) that is the new kind of map for freimap that we want
to use with Openstreetmap.

screenshot of the "new freimap"

An important mentor for this project is Alx Morlang from Freifunk in Berlin. Thank you! And our friends from Ninux namely – Saverio, Claudio and all of the team. Service Discovery will be tested first in the freifunk ninux network in Rome during the upcoming weeks with mdns.

screenshot of the "new freimap"