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 ;-)

thenextlayer.org, a plattform for arts, politics, free and open source software and peer based commons production has a nice article about how they used OLSR in the Hivenetworks setup in Southampton, London. Hivenetworks is used to transmitt "hidden stories" about "stories from Southamptons Oral History Archive selected and arranged to correspond with the location of the 10 nodes". That means you get streamed stories about a certain place's past via FM radio receiver.
The content is streamed digitally from the OLSR mesh boxes via mini FM radio transmitter. The transmitters have a very short range and thus are not interfering with real radio stations.

Nice creative work! :)

Top of tree has been tagged to OLSRD_0_5_6_RC1.

source tarballs can be downloaded at:

http://www.olsr.org/releases/0.5/olsrd-0.5.6-rc1.tar.bz2
MD5 49d55a68d1b2b2ac040f4c4df179ba69

http://www.olsr.org/releases/0.5/olsrd-0.5.6-rc1.tar.gz
MD5 d5161c51b8a3c75a1f19db1ff86c2e67

i am asking now the package maintainers to download, compile and test
on their target system and provide feedback (both positive and negative
feedback is welcome).

tentative release target for 0.5.6 will be May 10th.

There is a nice new small feature in olsrd: keeping the routes to a default gateway sticky.

Now, what do we mean by that?

Imagine you are running a mesh network with private IPs (192.168.x.x) and this network has multiple gateways. For example you share many DSL uplinks.
There is a well known problem with olsrd in these settings: if one route to a gateway becomes better than the previous route to a different gateway, then the route will switch.
This is a bit of a problem if the gateways NAT for you. In other words: your downloads will suddenly stop.

olsrd runs on the Classmate. Of course it is just a matter of compiling for 32 bit Intel CPUs and off you go! The Classmate does not come with mesh by default as compared to the OLPC's XO. So this is an easy way of adding mesh support. Same goes for the Asus Eee PC. In fact the machines are very very similar. You can use Asus's SDK to compile it.

The crew from FunkFeuer Weinviertel ported olsrd to the iPhone.
You can get it from the download area. However you still need a working olsrd.conf file. Start it via
olsrd -f $conffile -i en0 -d 0
A nice UI is still missing! Feel like making one?