Freifunk auf den Chemnitzer Linuxtagen 2012

Posted on by Mario Behling

Klaus Kruse stellt auf den diesjährigen Chemnitzer Linuxtagen Freifunk vor. Die Chemnitzer Linux-Tage sind die zweitgrößte Veranstaltung zum Thema Linux und Open Source in Deutschland.  Die Veranstaltung dreht sich rund um das Thema Linux und Open Source für jedermann. Sie wird vom IN Chemnitz, der CLUG, dem Rechenzentrum und der Fakultät für Informatik der TU Chemnitz und vielen freiwilligen Helfern durchgeführt.

Der Vortrag findet am Sonntag dem 18. März um 16:30 im Raum V3 statt.

Hier der Ankündigungstext:

Freifunk – drahtlose Community-Netzwerke. Unter dem Label «Freifunk» existiert eine deutschlandweite Bewegung, die vor Ort freie und offene WLAN-Netzwerke aufbaut. Zum Einsatz kommen Standardrouter und angepasste Firmware auf der Basis von OpenWRT. Der Vortrag zeigt die Motivation, wie die Technik funktioniert und wie sich jeder selbst am Aufbau eines Freifunk-Netzwerkes beteiligen kann.

Adresse des Events:
Hörsaal- und Seminar-Gebäude der Technischen Universität Chemnitz
Reichenhainer Straße 90
09126 Chemnitz

Weitere Informationen: http://chemnitzer.linux-tage.de

Ungeladene Gäste auf Freifunk-Server

Posted on by Mario Behling

Teile der Freifunk-Webseiten (die Zope/Plone-Installationen) sind auf den Servern von Letras gehostet. Häufig gibt es in letzter Zeit Nachrichten von Hackern, die auf fremden Servern agieren. Kürzlich hatten wir auch so einen ungebetenen Besuch. Hintergrundinformationen gibt es in der folgenden Mail von Werner Schultheiß.

Liebe Leute, gestern am späten Abend war das Zope/Plone-CMS, der DNS, die Mailing-Listen und 25 Minuten lang (zw. 23:13 und 23:38) das Gesamtsystem gestört, weiter heute abend die temporären Dateibereiche zeitweise nicht beschreibbar. Der Grund: Bei LETRAS war Großkampftag wegen Gästen, die sich selbst eingeladen hatten und es sich, eine Zeit lang unbemerkt, in versteckten Winkeln mit Verzeichnisnamen wie “.    ” und “.       ” unterhalb von /tmp und /dev/shm bequem gemacht hatten sowie dann über ein Loch im Apachen-Wigwam und, verkleidet als uid 33 “www-data”, häufig wieder kamen. Netterweise überließen mir die Jecken dabei eine Bash-History, die der geneigte Leser im Anhang findet. Diese half sehr beim Putzen und Abdichten, sodass die Gäste mangels Spaßfaktor jetzt verschwunden sind. Ich bin einigermaßen sicher, dass ich, mit der üblichen Restunsicherheit, die Zugänge sowie v.a. die Datenbereiche und Shell-Zugriffe wieder vollständig kontrolliere. Durch das eher am Schach- als am Ballerspiel orienterte Vorgehen musste auch nichts vom System abgerissen und neu augefsetzt werden, Tante Lenny darf in dieser virtuellen Maschine also noch eine Zeit lang mit Debian-Backports-Bandagen in der Verlängerung weiterspielen.

Für die technisch Interessierten, anbei noch eine Kopie des lauschigen .log-Verzeichnisses. $( 

freifunk at the CeBIT 2012

Posted on by Mario Behling

The CeBIT and Linux New Media are sponsoring Free/Open Source Projects to join the CeBIT from March 6-10 in Hannover, Germany. Freifunk was accepted as an Open Source organization. We have a booth and already have a confirmation of some Italien friends from the Ninux community who will join as well. 

I have set up a Wiki page for everyone who would like to help with the organization.

http://wiki.freifunk.net/CeBIT_2012

Preparations and communications are running over the following channel:

https://freifunk.net/mailman/listinfo/wlanware

The organizers already confirmed to us, that we will have power supply and Internet. “Connectivity will be by network cable, not by WiFi.” I think we can take care of that.

Links:

* Announcement at heise http://www.heise.de/open/meldung/CeBIT-2012-Open-Source-Projekte-gesucht-1385809.html

* CeBIT Website http://cebit.de

* Italian community http://ninux.org

* Organization Page for event http://wiki.freifunk.net/CeBIT_2012

* Preps and communication https://freifunk.net/mailman/listinfo/wlanware

Wireless Battle Mesh v5 in Greece – Call for papers

Posted on by Mario Behling

Wireless Battle Mesh v5 is at hand and it is time to bring together the agenda. As last year’s attempts to construct an agenda was well received and provided the grounds for numerous healthy discussions the broad majority asked for similar action. However, the number of talks is going to be reduced to leave more time for individual discussions and testing.

Submission

==========

To allow an efficient handling of your submission, please provide the following information and send them to me directly in form of an email:

* your name

* the type of your slot (talk/workshop/panel discussion/lightening talk)

* your topic headline

* your topic description which can brief (does not need to exceed a couple of lines) but should provide a reasonable summary of your talk

* the dates of your stay at the event + (optional) preferred day for your slot

* length of the slot if you wish to do a workshop (all other slots will be limited to one hour – notify me in advance if you think that is not enough for you)

Feel free to contact me with your ideas in case you are unsure about your topic. Last year’s agenda also should be able to provide some insights: http://battlemesh.org/BattleMeshV4/Agenda

Deadlines

=========

Submissions are accepted until and including the 16th of March. Everyone missing this deadline still has the opportunity to apply for a lightening talk slot. These slots can be acquired by simply contacting me during the event. The list of registered lightening talks will be published in the battlemesh wiki.

The final program will be made available in the aforementioned wiki during the second week of March.

Links:

* Battle Mesh Website: http://battlemesh.org

Freifunk Global Newswire Relaunched with Map and Embed Features

Posted on by Mario Behling
After several years of maintaining the Global Newswire, we have just launched a new site of Global.freifunk.net with updated feeds and cool map features. The new site uses the Managing News profile which is based on Drupal and developed by the folks from Development Seed. A big thanks goes to Thanh Nguyen from Vietnam, who set up the system together with me. As the other freifunk.net sites, the site is hosted at in-berlin.de.
 
Mario Behling and Thanh Nguyen working on freifunk.net in Vietnam 
Mario Behling and Thanh Nguyen working on freifunk.net in Vietnam 
 
It took us a few days to figure out how to make it work for us. Some errors like an issue with sharing just came up, because we had not activated clean URLs, other errors, because the different servers we use run slightly different MySQL versions with the one the site is hosted on. Initially we wanted to update the previous site with the new profile. This worked generally, but some features just did not want to get working. The Managing News installation profile has a number of preconfigured modules. After taking a week trying to figure it out, we went back to the start and took another way. We chose to use a fresh install and moved the content of the previous site with the node exporter module. While the old content does not show up in the history anymore now, it can still be found through the search.
 
Global Freifunk Newswire - Map View 
 
To geolocate places in articles we use Yahoo Placemaker, which seems to give a good outcome when tagging places in articles. As we have a rather large number of feeds that need to be checked and updated, we need to run cron every few minutes in order to avoid time outs.
Previously, we also had a special German news site focusing on the German speaking freifunk community. As hits on this website have been rather low over the last two years, we have closed that site and redirected it to the international news site saving us time to focus on one system.
So, here it is, the new Freifunk News Site. One thing I personally like is the embed feature that lets you embed any feed into your site. Please check it out and tell us which cool new features you like. 
 
 
 
If you would like us to include your feed, please add it to the wiki page on the freifunk wiki. We will check here from time to time and add feeds to the newswire.
Links:
* http://global.freifunk.net
* http://managingnews.com
* http://in-berlin.de
* http://wiki.freifunk.net/Global.freifunk.net

GSoC 2011: L-VN Lite Virtual Network

Posted on by Mario Behling

L-VN is a tool for overlay network creation based on IP in UDP encapsulation performed in Kernel space without encryption/authentication of the tunneled packets. The idea of L-VN is to exploit the IP/UDP encapsulation kernel module proposed for GSoC 2010  to develop a VPN/Overlay tool based on IP/UDP encapsulation performed in kernel space with no “security services” for the encapsulated packets (i.e. no confidentiality, no authentication). The goal is to provide a lightweight overlay network tool that might be preferable to other VPN/Overlay solutions for devices with limited computational resources. The project is a Freifunk-Ninux.org proposal, and is sponsored by the Google Summer of Code 2011 program.

L-VN consists of 3 main elements:

  1. IPUDP encapsulation module: is a kernel module that exports a virtual network devices that perform ip-udp encapsulation. Packets routed through this network interfaces will be encapsulated in IP/UDP headers and sent to the proper tunnel endpoint.  As to the current status, ipudp module provides 2 virtual devices modes:  A) FIXED mode: a single ipudp tunnel is bound to a virtual ipudp device. This type of virtual interface is double-stack, in the sense that we can assign both IPv4 and IPv6 address to the device and use it for both IPv4 and IPv6 applications. B) MULTI_V4 mode: multiple ipudp tunnels can be bound to this type of virtual interface. For each encapsulated packet, the proper tunnel is chosen by a set of rules that bind the destination IP address of the inner packet, with a given tunnel. For GSoC2011 the module has been updated to be compatible with kernel 2.6.38 and modified in different points to implement the keepalive mechanism.
  2. IPUDP configuration tool: this tool can be compiled as both program or library and provides a set of primitives based on NETLINK sockets to configure the IPUDP encapsulation module. IPUDP_CONF provides the necessary primitives for addition/removal of virtual network devices, ipudp tunnels and forwarding rules.
  3. IPUDP signaling agents: a client and a server program written in C for automatic tunnel establishment and management. In details, these components provides the following services: a) mutual authentication based on X509 certificates and TLS (openssl); b) NAT reflexed address discovery and automatic tunnel establishment; c) NAT binding keep alive; d) automatic inactive tunnel de-allocation. This component has been completely implemented for GSoC2011 but it still needs some work.

The code is available through the ninux SVN repository, at the path: https://svn.ninux.org/svn/ninuxdeveloping/ipudp/v02. Comments, remarks or any kind of support will be truly appreciated.

Contacts: marco.bonola@uniroma2.it, marco.giuntini@uniroma2.it

This article appeared first on Ninux.org: 

http://blog.ninux.org/2011/09/05/gsoc-2011-l-vn-lite-virtual-network/

GSoC 2011: Nodeshot

Posted on by Mario Behling

Do wireless communities around the world really need another map server? Here in Ninux we believe that the answer is yes!

Enter Nodeshot an open source wireless community map server written in python and based on django, focused on ease of useand performance.

Why a new map server? Mainly because we had some precise needs that the current open source map servers can’t satisfy easily:

  • we needed an application which is easy to use and understand for everyone
  • we wanted to preserve a similar look to the old map server we used before (wnmap).
  • we wanted it to be simple and performant
Instead of modifying and hacking the existing alternatives we decided to make a new one, trying to keep the code clean and well commented (which was one of the hardest tasks).

The frontend is built in HTML5 and it does an intensive use of jQuery and the Google Map API.

The backend is based on the django admin and it permits to easily administer the app.

These are the main features of the nodeshot:

  • Map based on Google Map API v3
  • New node with confirmation via email
  • Possibility to insert devices, interfaces and hna4 for a better troubleshooting
  • Edit node, devices, interfaces, hna4
  • Contact node owners
  • Address lookup
  • Hide sidebar
  • Search nodes and IP addresses
  • Distance calculation between nodes
  • Save distance calculations for future reference
  • Public information about devices, interfaces and performance of links
  • Statistics  (number of nodes, links, links in km)
  • IPv6 support

During the development we used github to commit changes and several merges have occurred in some cases when different developers were working to fix some issues.

The project has revealed to be more complex than what was expected but at the same time has been really engaging and fun.

There is still work to do though, actually we are translating and optimizing the app. We’ll keep working on nodeshot so that we can arrive quickly to a stable and performant release, we hope we’ll attract new developers from all around the world that will help us to push forward this new open source project!

Meanwhile, you can check the demo and you can download the source code on github.

This article appeared first on the website of Ninux.org: 

http://blog.ninux.org/2011/09/06/gsoc-2011-nodeshot

GSoC 2011: Videochat for Diaspora with Vittorio

Posted on by Mario Behling

I’m writing about the results achieved with my Google Summer of Code project, for the Ninux community, under the umbrella of Freifunk (I thank them both for the opportunity they gave me).

Briefly it consisted in developing a video chat feature for Diaspora*, a distributed social network.

This project has received a very big feedback and appreciations from the entire Diaspora community, including the core team, who helped and supported me during the development.

Basically, it provides two new functionalities to the Diaspora engine:

  • Textual chat, based on XMPP signaling protocol
  • Video chat, using Jingle XEP
Both have been developed in Javascript, with some Rails code. It usesStrophe.js library for the textual chat, based on XMPP Over BOSH standard, and a self-made extension of it to realize Jingleprotocol.
The project includes a custom ejabberd module in Erlang for the integration of ejabberd/diaspora databases, an Actionscript part for the video chat stuff and an external authentication script written in Ruby used by ejabberd to authenticate users from Diaspora.
The project has been split in two pull requests, and we’re currently fixing them before merge with master repository: [1],  [2].

Source code can be found at https://github.com/vcuculo/diaspora, under “jabber” and “video_chat” branches.

Setup instructions here. Some screen-shots: [1], [2], [3].

I hope it will be soon merged and improved by me and the community, to make it available on every Diaspora* pod!

Vittorio

**This article appeared first on the website of Ninux, our friends from Italy: http://blog.ninux.org/2011/08/30/gsoc-2011-videochat-for-diaspora/

GSOC 2011: RadioMate

Posted on by Mario Behling

The Ninux community, under the umbrella of Freifunk, developed four awesome open-source projects for the Google Summer of Code program 2011: a front-end for RadioMate, a new mapserver (called nodeshot), a video and chat extension to the social networking engine Diaspora* and a new tunneling tool.

In this post I will write about RadioMate, the project I was involved in. Then posts on the other projects will follow!

There are many web-radio projects that are closely involved in the world of Community Networks: in Rome Fusoradio and Radio Sonarare an active part of the community and relay on the ninux network for their streaming, in Leipzig Radio Blau (which transmits also in FM) gives big spaces to the Freifunk project, or RadioCona in Ljubljana, where the Wlan Slovenija project is based.

Often these web radios have to relay on closed-source software platforms as the available open-source solutions don’t fit their needs.

RadioMate is a free (as in freedom) community-wise Web-radio management system. Some of its features are:

  • support of multiple users with different privileges (roles)
  • easy radio schedule management
  • handling of audio files and playlists
  • extendable with new types of transmissions
  • interface with the icecast server
  • takeover of the radio streaming in case of “special editions”

While last year the RadioMate engine was developed, this year our efforts focused on a Web frontend. You can find a demo atradiomate.ninux.org. The username is “foobar” while the password is “secret”. Point also your player (e.g. VLC) atradiomate.ninux.org:8000.

For the techies, the engine is based on liquidsoap, written in Python, and easily extendable through liquidsoap scripts. It exports a JSON API which is exploited by the Javascript (jQuery) based Web frontend. Source code and documentation can be found at radiomate.org.

Of course there is still work to do, but I hope that this software will be soon used by our friends running webradios!

As we say in Rome:Daje!
Clauz

This article appeared first on the website of Ninux.org:

http://blog.ninux.org/2011/08/29/gsoc-2011-radiomate/