Hello everybody,

we just released the fourth revision of the 0.5.6 stable. The tarballs are at http://www.olsr.org/releases/0.5/olsrd-0.5.6-r4.tar.gz
This release fixes many bugs reported from the wifi communities and networks out there.
We appreciate your bug reports! Special thanks go to Henning Rogge and Markus Kittenberger for countless hours of bughunting and fixing.

While testing heavily the new upcoming 0.5.6-r4 release (testing == sweat, blood and tears)...
I glanced over a mail at the wisfii list.
They discussed the DUMBO project.

I heard about the "Digital Ubiquitous Mobile Broadband OLSR" project from Randy Bush half a year ago. Great stuff!

In brief: INRIA and Interlab AIT and Randy Bush used OLSR nodes on top of elephants for disaster relief work.
Low-tech meets high-tech :)

Sorry, there was a power spike in the funkfeuer.at server housing. So this server needed a manual reboot.
I will transfer all the data to a different server (more stable one). So we are up and running again.

I have been sitting together with Ivan Klimek from CNL in Slovakia and we had a great hack evening. While I was briefly busy in the meantime he ported over olsrd-0.5.5 to the Google Android Phone! Hurray!

You can download it from here

This will be officialy presented on the MANIAC Challenge'09, March 8-9, PeerCom 2009 Galveston, Texas. http://www.maniacchallenge.org/
In case you are also interesting in adding a service discovery layer on top of that - please get in get in contact with me.

after 4 weeks of joint collaboration the developer community
have hunt down a couple of bugs. we are proud to release
another spin of our 0.5.6 (stable) branch.

source tarballs can be downloaded at:

http://www.olsr.org/releases/0.5/olsrd-0.5.6-r3.tar.bz2
MD5-sum 0935688fa0fb5b0e073fe53ec654c5b2

http://www.olsr.org/releases/0.5/olsrd-0.5.6-r3.tar.gz
MD5-sum 3bf92e748ca14f27c7de2669fe8ac2a5

source tarballs can be downloaded at:

http://www.olsr.org/releases/0.5/olsrd-0.5.6-r2.tar.bz2
MD5-sum eb72e4899142daa1a6237831da40eb74

http://www.olsr.org/releases/0.5/olsrd-0.5.6-r2.tar.gz
MD5-sum acf15dbd0af521a6826541b567c6473a

For some time we already had - thanks to Lorenz Schori! - a very practical plugin: txtinfo.
In this brief HOWTO we are going to discuss how you can use it to extract information from OLSRd about it's view of the net in a very universal way. The txtinfo plugin can serve as basis for many other visualization plugins. I also want to show you how you can use the watch command to debug your OLSR testbed network.

As usual, you can compile it with "make libs; make install_libs" and add it to your olsrd.conf file like this:


LoadPlugin "olsrd_txtinfo.so.0.1"
{
PlParam "port" "8080"
PlParam "Host" "127.0.0.1"
# PlParam "Net" "0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0"
# PlParam "Host" "80.23.53.22"
# # PlParam "Net" "192.168.0.0 255.255.0.0"
}


This means the txtinfo plugin will listen to port 8080 and accept connections from localhost.
So what happens now when you connect to port 8080?
I will connect to it via the well known netcat program and give the txtinfo some commands:
...

putting everything in a different routing table

Since a few months there is an option "RtTable" and "RtTableDefault" in olsrd.conf.
This basically serves as the name of a routing table where olsrd should put it's routes that it learned over the network.

The reasoning for that was that while developing, you want to have an easy way to flush all stale routes from a specific routing table ("man ip").
This works in Linux.

Example:
RtTableDefault 100


I just noticed an very slick way how to make OLSR into a hybrid mesh protocol. Hybrid in the sense: the best of two worlds - on the one hand MOTEs and sensor network nodes which use almost no power at all and on the other hand the high bandwidth / high mobility / highly scalable wifi ad-hoc mesh networks nodes (where OLSR is usually employed).

Like all very important scientific discoveries - this happened by accident :)

I was running wireshark on my PC and wanted to see what kind of strange traffic I can see in the office (*cough*cough*)
Much to my surprise there were OLSR packets in the captured file. This struck me as quite strange since I don't know of any device here which has OLSR running.
So I was searching for the device with IP addr. 10.0.0.132.

Funny enough the OLSR packets stopped. Nothing. Can't ssh into 10.0.0.32. ping does not react anymore. nmap -O did not tell me what type of OS it had.
Half an hour later I hear a "beep beep" from my iPhone which alarmed me to do something serious (instead of writing this text now)
And sure enough the OLSR packets arrived again!! My iPhone had woken up and olsrd resumed working flawlessly!

Hence: send your iPhone an SMS in case you want to activate it as OLSR mesh router ;-)