Freifunk Digital Twin – GSoC 2021 – Phase I

Prologue

Hey community 👋
This is the first update on the GSoC 2021-Freifunk Digital Twin Project.

Recap

The goals for the first phase were:

• determine a management tool for 100+ VM´s and OpenWrt Devices
• figure out how to fetch and prepare topology information from routing daemons

So let´s see how that went…

Achievements

After testing and playing around with Qemu, the next step was to find a suitable VM-Management tool that is able to manage 100+ VMs. After several hours of reading and testing, i finally chose libvirt, because it´s open source, lightweight and CLI-controllable. But because it´s so extensive, i needed plenty of time to read in an get up a proper OpenWRT-VM but now it works quite well. After that, we decided to migrate our test environment from my local computer to our lab-server, which is more powerful. After some technical issues, which cost us plenty of time, the environment was finally up an running and it is now able to start and host 100+ OpenWRT VMs. Because of the stated problems, i doesn´t have much to show to you at the moment, so i´m going to update this post in the next few days.

Next steps

• figure out how to fetch and prepare topology information from routing daemons
• Write a script that combines VM management and network management

See you in the next few days with a new update post. ✌️