Join the Wireless Battle Mesh in Brussels

HackerSpaceBrussels (HSB) announces the second Wireless Battle Mesh, which aims to test 3 popular WiFi routing protocols (OLSR, Batman and Babel), in Brussels on Saturday and Sunday 17-18 October 2009.


Wireless Mesh Battle: OLSR vs. BATMAN vs. Babel

Agenda

  • Tue 06 Oct @ 21:00: final IRC meeting to prepare the design of the networks (see below)
  • Sat 10 Oct @19:30: IPv6 presentation (Filip P.) + panel on possibilities & pittfalls of IPv6 for free networks
  • Tue 13 Oct – Fri 16 Oct: OpenWRT workshops
    (openwrt installation & configuration, kamikaze build environment,
    ssh keys infrastructure, firmware generation, UCI configuration tool,
    asterisk/ SIP phone)
  • Fri 16 Oct @ 18:00 : Deploy the nodes
  • Sat 17 Oct @ 14:00: Deploy the nodes, setup tests
  • Sat 17 Oct @ 19:00: concert "I’m sitting under an antenna" v.a., org. by OKNO
  • Sun 18 Oct @ 14:00: The battle! 🙂

IRC meetings

We setup some IRC meetings to prepare the configuration: IP’s,
versions, and everything that took too much time at WBM v1. The
meetings will be held on the tuesdays of 15 and 22 September and 06
October at 21:00 CET on irc.freenode.net channel #hsbxl. People from
Brussels and around are invited to join us at the hackerspace.

Fee

The event is free. We’ll kindly ask you for a donation to cover some costs.

Location

Okno
Quai des Charbonnages 30-34
1080 Brussels
http://okno.be
http://tinyurl.com/oknomap

Transport

  • Metro: Compte de Flandres / Graaf van Vlaanderen
  • Train: Go to Brussels central station and take metro from there (metro 5 direction Erasmus)
  • Route planner in Brussels

Registration

Space is limited, so we ask you to register in advance by registering:

  1. send an email with your name and surname to contact@voidpointer.be AND
  2. register on Doodle

Requirements

  • Bring your laptop/computer
  • Bring your compatible router(s) with OpenWRT pre-installed
  • Bring your WiFi antenna(s) and connectors

Accomodation

  • Zoobab is offering some free space to sleep (contact him at zoobab@gmail.com)
  • If you have problems finding accomodation, let us know (contact@voidpointer.be) — there always be some couches free at HSB.

Contact

Email: contact@voidpointer.be
Tel (ptr_): +32 493 52 50 09
Tel (zoobab): +32 484 56 61 09

Links

[via zoobab]

Open Hardware: Interview with Jürgen Neumann and Marek Lindner

Jürgen Neumann, one of the initiators of freifunk.net, and Marek Lindner, openmoko developer and B.A.T.M.A.N. programmer, speak about the Open Hardware Initiative event Open Tech Summit in Taiwan.

Freifunk Wireless Community Weekend 2008 – Thank you!

The Freifunk Wireless Community Weekend 2008 is over. I had a fantastic time meeting so many people pushing the idea of free networks to new hights. The interest in free wireless was overwhelming and we probably had more than double the number of the 51 visitors who put their names on the participants list. Many developers were taking part. We saw presentations about OpenWRT, B.A.T.M.A.N., the HorstTool, mikroFM, OpenHardware and the Luci-Interface for Freifunk networks. Receiving questions about "free networks and the implications of the law" regularly, we were extremely pleased that Reto Mantz recently published a doctoral thesis about this subject and held a presentation at the WCW (slides now available).

Besides German communities we were very happy to meet many friends from other countries like www.guifi.net from Catalunia, Spain, Sergey Yugov from Russia, Jesper Svarre with 28 people from Denmark and our friends from the Rome community ninux.org.

Together with the help of Italian and German Freifunkers Saverio and me made tons of interviews. Be sure it will not take two years this time to see them online 😉 Get a little taste of the WCW2008 with the first of a series of videos already published by our Italian friends.

Per ora vi lascio con questo breve video, che mostra qualche immagine
della domenicale del Wireless Community Weekend. Molto presto verranno
pubblicate le interviste. (http://blog.ninux.org/2008/05/05/lultima-sera-al-wcw2008/)

Direct Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGZcH49j4hw

Last Preparations for the Freifunk Wireless Community Weekend 2008 in Berlin

The countdown for the Freifunk Wireless Community Weekend 2008 conference is running and cven is haevily working on the final preparation.

As of now we have 48 people who have put their name on the participants list on the wiki at http://wiki.freifunk.net/WCW08:participants and many more who have confirmed their participation to us directly. People are joining us in the upcoming days from Freifunk communities from all over Germany and from communities in other countries. Our friends from Italy will be represented by the two well known free wireless evangelists Nino and Saverio from ninux.org and we expect Jesper Svarre from Denmark with a group of 25 people from the Association of Computer Professionals.

The WCW is a self organized conference and community gathering. We will have a community track with communities presenting themselves, e.g. from Bastian from the Weimar Freifunkers and from Keks from the community in Berlin North-East.

On the other side there will be technical talks from developers of OpenWRT, the B.A.T.M.A.N. routing protocol developers Marek Lindner and Simon Wunderlich; Thomas Hirsch – the developer of the freimap and a presentation of sven-ola – the main developer of the Freifunk Firmware,

Further panels cover subjects like Web 2.0 in the Freifunk Universe (by me, Mario Behling) or Open Networks and the current law by Dr. Reto Mantz, who has recently published a book on "Offene Netze und Recht",

Many opportunities to meet with some of the most exciting people in the international freifunk sphere! Open Mesh advocat Electra will take part in the WCW and after returning from the Open Tech Summit in Taiwan Juergen Neumann will present the latest advancements on Open Wireless Hardware. 

Last but not least we are happy to welcome participants from the academic scene coming from the TU Berlin and the Fraunhofer FOKUS Institute.

Join us at the Freifunki Wireless Community Weekend in Berlin from May 2-4! Check out the latest updates on http://wiki.freifunk.net/Wireless_Community_Weekend_2008

Wireless Kernel Tweaking or how B.A.T.M.A.N. learned to fly – Presentation at the 24c3 by Marek Lindner and Simon Wunderlich

Marek Lindner and Simon Wunderlich from the Berlin freifunk community gave a talk on Wireless Kernel Tweaking and the B.A.T.M.A.N. routing protocol at the 24c3 Chaos Communication Congress. The video is now available on the torrent network.

Kernel hacking definitely is the queen of coding but in order to bring mesh routing that one vital step further we had to conquer this, for us, unchartered territory. Working in the kernel itself is a tough and difficult task to manage, but the results and effectivity to be gained justify the long and hard road to success. We took on the mission to go down that road and the result is B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced which is a kernel land implementation of the B.A.T.M.A.N. mesh routing protocol specifically designed to manage Wireless MANs.

During the last years the number of deployed mesh networks has increased dramatically and their constant growth drove us around the edge of what we thought was possible. To cope with this rapid development we had to leave the slow and limited track of tweaking existing approaches and take an evolutionary step forward by porting the B.A.T.M.A.N. protocol into the kernel land and going down to layer 2. Using B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced as a showcase we will, in our lecture, deliver a detailed review on how one can go about developing linux kernel modules, give insights in what difficulties to expect and provide practical tips on how to go about this challenge without experiencing a damaging kernel freeze in due process.

We will describe what problems we faced migrating down to layer 2 and how we went about solving them for example how we moved away from the kernel routing and handle the actual routing and data transport in B.A.T.M.A.N. itself. Also moving to layer 2 meant to leave IPs behind and solely rely on MAC-routing enabling features like DHCP, IPX, IPv6, etc which up to now was not possible and therefore comes as a big plus. On the other hand there were little if none diagnostic tools at all for routing on that level so we had to go back one step and develop the tools we needed ourselves.

These and other things we will cover in our presentation and also give an outlook into the future of mesh-routing, which will bring it even closer to the source of wifi – the wireless stack and its drivers and thereby improving the overall performance even more.

Link: www.open-mesh.net

 

Freifunk auf dem 24c3 Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin

Morgen, am 27. Dezember beginnt der 24. Chaos Communication Congress (24c3) im Berliner Congress Center am Alexanderplatz unter dem Motto Volldampf voraus!

Der Kongress dauert bis zum 30. Dezember. Die Freifunk-Community trifft sich hier unter anderem in der Embedded Corner auf der Ebene C im ersten Stock neben der Treppe. Im Wiki haben sich bereits Freifunker aus Bern, Hamburg, Leipzig, Rostock sowie der Berliner Initiativen aus der City, vom Kiezfunk und aus Berlin Nordost angekündigt. Themen werden die aktuelle Firmware, die Erfahrungen mit dem neuen Routingprotokoll B.A.T.M.A.N. und die Idee der Open Hardware Prism sein.

Wir freuen uns auch auf interessante Zusammentreffen mit "wireless groups from all over", Gnu Radio, Decentral applications/protocols, Openembedded, Opemmoko, Settopfoo und vielen anderen.

Zur Einstimmung findet heute ab 20:00 das WaveLoeten auf der c-base statt. Die c-base ist während der drei Tage bereits ab morgens um 9:00 geöffnet. Eintritt ist frei.

 

FF-Firmware 1.6.10a in Leipzig mit B.A.T.M.A.N. als “Schattenmesh” released

Just wurde nach langem Werkeln in Leipzig eine neue stable Firmware (1.6.10-a) veröffentlicht. Im Leipziger Mesh kann diese über die automatische Updatefunktion (ab 1.4.5) per Klick geladen werden, im www unter http://firmware.leipzig.freifunk.net In dieser Firmware wird erstmalig batmand konsequent als "Zweitmesh" eingesetzt. Batman selbst trifft (noch) keine Routing-Entscheidungen, die Tunnel zu Gateways sind abgeschaltet, damit der OLSR-Betrieb nicht gestört wird. Es wird fleissig beobachtet und debugged. Designtechnisch kommt die FW im schwarzen Look der cccamp07-Firmware daher. Ausserdem: Update-Warnung auch für einzelne Pakete, neuer Statistik-Feel und viele Kleinigkeiten. Thanx to Tetzlav und Jo.

Chaosradio Express mit Elektra zu Freifunk und B.A.T.M.A.N.

Elektra gibt einige Einblicke zu B.A.T.M.A.N., dem Freifunk-Protokoll der Zukunft, im Chaosradio.

Schon in Chaosradio Express
016 hat Elektra einen tiefen Einblick in Wesen und Form des Mesh
Networking geboten. Im Gespräch mit Tim Pritlove werden nun die
neuesten Erkenntnisse der Entwicklung berichtet. Kern der
Neuigkeiten ist der Nachfolger des OLSR-Protokolls namens B.A.T.M.A.N.
Elektra erläutert, wie B.A.T.M.A.N. im Deatil funktioniert, welche
Erfahrungen und Erkenntnisse seinem Design zu Grunde liegen und wie man
sich das alles vorstellen muss. Ein Teil der Diskussion betrifft auch
die geplante Mesh Networking Technologie im OLPC (XO) Laptop. (20.9.2007,
http://chaosradio.ccc.de/cre045.html)

Links:

B.A.T.M.A.N.-Kapitel aus dem kompetentesten Buch über freie Mesh-Netzwerke, das es gibt jetzt zum freien Download

Aus dem von elektra verfassten Buch "Mesh", welches Anfang August bei opensourcepress.de erschienen ist, gibt es jetzt das Kapitel über B.A.T.M.A.N als pdf-Download: https://www.opensourcepress.de/fileadmin/osp/pdf/mesh_leseprobe.pdf
Ausserdem beim EDV-Buchversand das Vorwort als Teaser…!

(via Cven)

Podcast von der B.A.T.M.A.N.-Release-Party in Berlin auf Rundfreifunk

(via Ufo)
Am letzten Sonntag liefen auf Rundfreifunk Interviews von der B.A.T.M.A.N.-Release-Party. Die Party fand auf der c-base in Berlin statt. Die Sendung findet man nun auch online unter http://www.public-ip.org/sendung-170.html. Darin unter anderem Interviews mit: Elektra, Sven-Ola., Tetzlav, Ludger und Poelzi zu OLSR, BATMAN, Firewalls und Puffer-/Pollraten…

Rundfreifunk sendet in Leipzig auf UKW und im Internet unter http://rund.freifunk.net und http://www.public-ip.org.

Viel Spaß beim Hören!