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.

The Joys of IPv6!

Our webserver (and mail server) speaks IPv6, however relaying to it's smarthost did not work over IPv6. Therefore, the Bugtracker could not re-send forgotten passwords. Sorry about that. It is fixed now.

Markus Kittenberger and Henning recently released 0.6.1 of OLSRd.
The release is a pure bugfix release, no major changes, primarily lots of fixes.

You can access the new version through our repository at http://olsr.org/git or by downloading the tarballs from

http://www.olsr.org/releases/0.6/olsrd-0.6.1.tar.bz2 or: http://www.olsr.org/releases/0.6/olsrd-0.6.1.tar.gz

The md5 sums of these files are stored in a GPG signed text file at http://www.olsr.org/releases/0.6/olsrd-0.6.1.gpg (the 0.6.1 tag in the repository is signed too)

Changes

• Major bugfix for the neighbor table when a neighbor gets a new main IP.
• add /interface command to txtinfo, allow multiple commands per request
• wait up to four seconds for aquiring the OLSRd lock. This helps to shutdown OLSRd with a script and restart it at once (kill pid is asynchrone, and kill -w is not available in busybox)...
  

Gregor posted a great and quick HOWTO on running olsrd on the N900 Nokia phone.

After lots of work , OLSR 0.6.0 is released.
It contains lots of bug fixes and some exceptionally interesting features such as SmartGateway which allows OLSR to build automatic IPIP tunnels to a gateway to prevent gateway flapping. This helps all Wi-Fi networks which run on private IP addresses and where the gateway is a NAT device.

You can access the new version through our repository at http://olsr.org/git
or by downloading the tarballs from
http://www.olsr.org/releases/0.6/olsrd-0.6.0.tar.bz2
http://www.olsr.org/releases/0.6/olsrd-0.6.0.tar.gz

The md5 sums of this files are stored in a GPG signed text file at
http://www.olsr.org/releases/0.6/olsrd-0.6.0.gpg

(the 0.6.0 tag in the repository is signed too)

The full release notes can be seen here: http://lists.olsr.org/pipermail/olsr-users/2010-May/003998.html

Much fun with the new version

Henning installed a new Bugtracker (MantisBT) on olsr.org/bugs.
We want to get the different TODO.txt lists organized online (and not just have a list of mails on the mailing lists).

In case you still know of an open bug in OLSR, please be so kind and take 2 minutes to register there, enter your bug and we can thus take care of it in an organized fashion.

OLSR.org is (amongst other networks) heavily used by the Freifunk networks in Germany. We are lucky that Freifunk applied as a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code (GSoc). You can find details on the Freifunk GSoC here.

So, you can apply for some of our projects or propose your own project in order to enhance OLSR.

What do you need to do?

1. get in contact with us on our mailing lists: olsr-dev@lists.olsr.org
2. think of a cool project to enhance OLSR and discuss it with us or ...chose from a list of open topics
3. register at the GSoC site as a student no later than April 9th and apply. If we believe that we can support your idea, we will approve your project
   
4. code

5. collect the payment: Google pays you for contributing code to an open source project. Everybody is happy

Please take a look at the timeline.
Thanks go to Mario Behling for applying and managing the GSoC Freifunk project.

The first version of the olsrd 0.5.6-r8 tarballs were correct, but contained the .git subdirectory, which inflated the size to >30 megabytes. We have uploaded a new pair of tarballs (and a corresponding gpg keyfile) which are much smaller, but contain the same code.