[liberationtech] Mesh Networks?

[The Doctor]

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On 06/17/2011 12:33 PM, Douglas Finley wrote:
> Can we practice in the States first? Or asynchronously. Whatever.
> Pick a community. Build a mesh network. And see what happens.

We are working on that at HacDC right now.  We call it Project
Byzantium, and aim to help solve the Egypt problem of network
infrastructure compromise as well as the Katrina problem.  Our design
goals include improvisability (being able to repurpose equipment laying
around your (and your neighbors') houses and apartments to set up a
mesh), rapid deployment, and resiliency.

So far, our experiments have been pretty fruitful.  We have built a
couple of small-ish meshes (5-10 nodes each) using BATMAN-adv and Babel
and have gotten them to work.  We also used some hacked wireless access
points to build mesh nodes as a proof of concept.  We have also run
multiple meshes in parallel and bridged traffic between them.

Right now we are working on a live distribution of Linux that can be
used to turn a computer with a wireless network device into a mesh node
that can also be used to gateway traffic to the Net, run and announce
the presence of useful services (microblogs, forums, and realtime chat
to name a few), and make it possible for wireless devices not running
mesh networking software (like smartphones) to make use of the mesh
(which is easier than it sounds).  We've been working independently and
meeting up for monthly development sprints (where we put everything
together) since March of 2011.

http://wiki.hacdc.org/index.php/Byzantium

- -- 

The Doctor [412/724/301/703]

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> blorple the featureless cube

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