[wha-net-discuss] wireless net test 1

[Adrian Soundy]

Hi everybody,

I have been playing around with 7 of Julians open-mesh mini routers

All have been added to the wha.net.nz mesh network so if you zoom in on the
Kaikokopu road cluster you will see all the nodes and the connections
between them.

Before doing any tests I plugged all 7 routers into the internet and let
them upgrade themselves to the latest stable release.
This took about 2 hours before all had been updated.

Next I placed them around the house with 6 as repeaters and 1 as a gateway.
When you switch on a node it takes about 5 minutes to come up as a repeater.
It first checks its lan connection for an internet connection before
deciding to configure itself as a repeater.

I now walked around the house with a laptop to make sure all nodes could be
seen and then waited for the status to be relected on the website. When up
and running they update their status to the web site every 5 minutes.

Now I tried a few tests

On a running repeater(#7) I plugged in an internet connection and waited.
After about 20mins it was up as gateway and some nodes had moved to using
it.

Now I disconnected the other gateway and the rest of nodes moved over to new
gateway.

Reconnected gateway and nodes moved back to using it.

All this takes time to happen, about 15 minutes or more till you see each
test reflected on web site.


The next test was to try using the Orangemesh front end.

I installed this on a local Kunbuntu box and updated the open-mesh site with
the address of the new front end. 
Nothing happened so I started looking at what was going wrong. First I found
that you need to change a parameter so the gateway can access the local
network, which affects all gateways. Then I found that although the update
site address parameter was changing on the router it still wasn't working,
it was still updating the normal site. Now I dug a bit deeper and found the
script that updates the site and found it was hard coded with the open-mesh
site and didn't look at the parameters. Maybe a test release fixes this.
Patching my address into the script fixed the problem and the orangemesh
site worked. There are less options on the Orangemesh front end but it does
work.

These routers run an adhoc network for the mesh and an open and secure AP
all off the same radio. I thought I would try hiding the Secure AP as there
was a parameter for it on the config site. This didn't work either.

It seems what we are running here is very much a work in progress. Maybe a
test release will be more complete.

The next thing I decided to look at was the problems we were having with the
POE( Power over Ethernet ) at Guyton street and Mount View road but I will
leave that for the next posting.