After a couple of interested parties contacted me, I've been spurred into motion again on the Lancaster Mesh front. Unfortunately, only one of the people getting in contact was from the area, the other was looking to start a mesh system in Kent. To this end, I'm going to concentrate more on getting a functioning firmware build system working that can be easily customised for other mesh communities. Once that is done I will look into building a Debian package that can be installed onto a standard machine.

Roadmap

• Primary Release - Completed
  • Working IPv4 firmware for WRT54GL (and family) - 100%
    • Auto configuration of nodes (gateway/bridge)
    • Local DNS service
    • DHCP on LAN sockets, and machines can plug into LAN to access the net
  • NodeDB working for registering new nodes and assigning new IPs - 100%
• Release v2 - Completed
  • Clean up buildroot to seperate the mesh stuff into its own package - 100%
  • Simplify changing config settings for other mesh projects - 100%
  • Minimise changes to other packages - 100%
  • Versioning for firmware - 100%
  • Ability to claim ownership of node and program longitude and latitude - 100%
  • Some form of security on the wireless connections (WEP, WPA) - 100%
• Release v2.5
  • Update to kamikaze build (kernel 2.4 and 2.6) - 100%
  • Move lancastermesh to a seperate package - force dependencies - 100%
• Release v3
  • Create Debian package for Mesh
  • Plot nodes onto a map (Google?)
  • Live mesh CD
  • Ensure all documentation is up to date

Current Status

05/06/07

Moved to kamikaze buildroot, also seperated out all files into a seperate lancastermesh package. Hopefully the resulting ipkg can be installed onto an existing openwrt instance.

11/09/06

Well, just about to upload Release 2! Only managed to get WEP working in regards security. Also, the olsr secure plugin won't work because of the timestamps being out. The WRT54G just doesn't have a good internal clock. Each firmware version will now have a build number associated with it to keep track of all the minor changes. This is basically a number that is incremented each time I recompile the source. Hopefully I can start deploying this now as there will not be any major functional changes for a while. Security will possibly have to be revisited, but that can wait for now.

10/09/06

Got most of the things that I want to implement for release 2 started. Had a slight problem with the firmware being too big to tftp to the wrt54g, but have managed to cut down the number of pre-installed packages to give quite a bit more growth now. The main mesh configuration is now in a single seperate file and the whole thing is in a seperate ipkg. Changes to the standard whiterussian buildroot are now quite minimal. I'll upload a new diff and instructions soon. Need to look at security now.

03/09/06

Users on the local LAN connections can go to the admin page and claim ownership of a node and record their longitude and latitude. Need to test this and make sure it is only users on the LAN who can do this.

02/09/06

Uploaded the final Release 1 firmware. Everything seems to be working as I want it, so now onto Release 2

01/09/06

New firmware uploaded. Local DNS is working (maradns), resolving to the root DNS servers. Nodes will autoconfigure as either bridge or gateway modes. Added dnsmasq back to the build to allow DHCP allocation on the LAN interfaces. All nodes registering with NodeDB OK.

30/08/06

The current firmware available is based on IPv6, which whilst probably being the right way to go, is a little too complicated and not quite ready. To this end a new firmware will be coming out that uses IPv4 and a central database. The central database is more or less functional.