Talk

User "stoker" released an interesting looking bundle for running OLSR on your Android phone.

From the MANET Manager README:
"Requirements:
- Root access
- Kernel which supports wireless extensions (wext)
- Wireless device driver which supports ad-hoc mode (Broadcom works well)

Supported devices:
- Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1
- Samsung Galaxy S II Epic Touch 4G SPH-D710
- Samsung Galaxy Nexus SCH-i515 (custom kernel)
- ASUS Transformer Prime TF201 (custom kernel)
- ASUS Nexus 7 (custom kernel)"

Check out: https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=stoker and let us know what you think!

Decentralizing GSM to Wi-Fi mesh phone calls.
by Alexander Chemeris

Integrating OpenBTS and Serval consists of two core components:

1) Routing systems inter-operation.
2) Numbering systems inter-operation.

Each are explained below.

1. Routing inter-operation was achieved during the Code Sprint hosted at the New
America Foundation in Washington, DC in early June, 2011. By using the OLSR
protocol on both Serval mobiles and on an OpenBTS test node, participants were
able to route IP packets in a flexible way in a mobile ad-hoc network without
any need for manual configuration. The OpenBTS part of the OLSR setup was pretty
smooth, taking roughly half an hour to get everything up, configured and

Henning and me got a time slot to present the Funkfeuer.at community wireless network as well as the OLSR.org work at the IETF80 meeting in Prague.
Slides are available.

Sorry for the downtime the last 2-3 days.
First of all: our security system at the funkfeuer.at colo center was so good that it did not let me in with my RFID cards.
Second the server did not start anymore. So I took the whole thing back home and extracted the data from the harddisk and copied it to a new server.
Good news: the new server is pretty fast. Quadcore, 8GB RAM. Nice stuff.

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.

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.

Building and Setup

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"
{
# the default port is 2006 but you can change it like this:
#PlParam "port" "8080"
# You can set a single address to allow to connect to txtinfo. If no address
# is specified, then localhost (127.0.0.1) is allowed by default.
#PlParam "accept" "127.0.0.1"
#PlParam "accept" "172.29.44.23"
# if you set it to 0.0.0.0, it will accept all connections
#PlParam "accept" "0.0.0.0"
}


This means the txtinfo plugin will listen to port 2006 and accept connections from localhost. (the "Net" parameter is not currently working).

Getting Information from txtinfo

The txtinfo plugin accepts any connection on a socket, and based on some URL-like commands, it will return tables of status information. You can combine the URL-like commands to get multiple tables of info with the same request.

Using txtinfo with netcat (nc)

So what happens now when you connect to the txt info port? I will connect to it via the well known netcat program and give the txtinfo a command:
...

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! :)

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.

Talk material is at:

http://www.olsr.org/~hannes/olsr-ng-v2.pdf
http://www.olsr.org/~hannes/olsr-ng.mp3