[Battlemesh] No results again

[nemesis]

 On Mon, 9 May 2016 13:05:02 +0200, Pau <pau at dabax.net> wrote:
> Thank you for your efforts Federico, I saw you working hard and 
> taking
> several responsibilities.
>
> In general I agree with all you say. However I think it is not fear 
> to
> blame the firmware 'wibed' as the main cause for the experimentation
> failing. In my opinion, the main problem has been the low involvement 
> of
> the people. From a total of 40-60 nerds only a group of 4-5 were 
> really
> taking care of the whole tasks for the experimentation: preparing the
> hardware, preparing the firmware, preparing the experiments and so 
> on.
> And the most frustrating part, for me, was that once the testbed was
> really running no one was interested on making the experiments.
>
> There have been now three consecutive years using Wibed, and there 
> have
> been several improvements year after year. The funny part here is 
> that
> in Leipzig we manage to make experiments and generate results using
> WiBed. So please don't say it was never working.
>
> The main problems we had this year, under my point of view, were:
>
> 1) Using a single 2.4GHz radio for management network is not enough,
> most of the problems were because of the weakness of the network. It 
> was
> really hard or even impossible to distribute the Overlays and execute
> the remote commands. The last day we change to dual-band radio for
> management and suddenly it worked much better.
>
> 2) The overlay for experimentation was not ready and it required new
> coding. For instance we implement a new IP approach, which required
> implementation, testing, failing and fixing. But it has nothing to do
> with Wibed.
>
> We can start a new firmware again the next year, going back to the 
> old
> approach and installing everything into the ROM. However flashing all
> nodes (~40) is not an easy and quick task (we already know this). 
> Thanks
> to the approach of Wibed (use a generic ROM and install the protocols
> and testing suit into an external USB overlay distributed by a 
> central
> controller), we could install and test different overlays without the
> need of re-flashing everything.
>
> In addition, it implements security mechanisms, such as auto-remove 
> the
> overlay and go back to the stock ROM in case of a failure. For 
> instance
> in some moment we distributed a wrong command and all nodes were
> inaccessible. But in no more than 20 minutes, all nodes were again
> online and working, without the need of re-flashing.
>
> Anyway, the next year the firmware/testing team will choose if using
> WiBed or if start a new firmware. I strongly think it would be worth 
> to
> keep using and improving it, but it is not up to me.
>
> What I really think we should discuss, is the fact that people seem 
> to
> be no longer interested on running experiments. It might be fine, but 
> we
> should put this on the table and maybe change the focus of this
> nice-wonderful event.
>
> Thanks to everyone who was there, it has been a really nice 
> experience.

 Indeed I did not blame wibed for everything but several causes, which 
 comprehend the weak points of wibed, unfortunately.

 There were other causes equally important, in primis the human factor 
 that did not work great in the first days, then all the rest of the 
 technical issues.

 But some people here are not speaking out in order to not spark 
 controversy and I think this is not healthy for the growth of this 
 community.
 To this regard, I have to say it is not true that we were only 5-6 
 people working on the testbed.
 At one point we had other 5 people writing test scripts which were 
 included in the overlay. Only one of them did not give up and concluded 
 the activity (props to Claudio!), the others gave up after they could 
 not test the scripts they were writing, they preferred to enjoy the rest 
 of the event rather than frustrating themselves how we were doing and 
 sincerely I don't think we can blame them for our failure in getting 
 test results.

 So we can go ahead and ignore all this stuff, try again next year with 
 wibed all together, or we can acknowledge that some people do not find 
 comfortable to work with wibed and would prefer alternative tools and we 
 can choose to let these people go ahead with their alternative proposals 
 and see if they can get anything better, in peace, without blaming each 
 other for failures but collaborating in order to get working 
 configurations, measurements and documentation.

 Federico