Talk

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.

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:
...

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

Aaron held a presentation of the OLSR-NG project at the Chaos Computer Club...

I presented our OLSR-NG work at the CCC congress in Berlin around new year.
Here you can find the slides of my lightning talk.