[Battlemesh] Divide and Conquer? (Was: Summary of the futuristic meeting)

[Linus Lüssing]

On Tue, Jun 13, 2017 at 10:04:27PM +0200, Linus Lüssing wrote:
> ---
> 
> BattleMesh:
> 
> * Hackathon
> * Some Hackerspace
> * Focussed on hacking and finally testing new stuff
>   -> The testbed!

And a few more, rough thoughts regarding the annual
testbed topic/discussions:


# Firmware

I liked the little LibreMesh / Gluon meeting we had in Vienna.
Maybe we can continue our discussions and try to make our
frameworks flexible enough in a way that maybe both might be
able to provide a suitable, stable firmware for a testbed next
year, from day 0? Next to a stable, well-tested firmware
LibreMesh/Gluon would be able to provide a firmware which is close
to a firmware you would/could run in the wild (e.g. a user could
just unselect some packages / keep the protocol which won the
contest(s) which fits his/her use-case best).

Of course, if someone would want to compile and test a new/dedicated
firmware, with maybe some LEDE/OpenWrt trunk version again, that
shouldn't conflict. (For instance Gluon/LibreMesh could just use
the first days? As historically a custom firmware historically was
never ready before day 3?)


# Tests

A lack of challenges was mentioned by some as something missing.
And having an annual theme/challenge, maybe provided by some
community, was suggested.

This made me think about events like Demoparties [0] or
CtF [1] events: Would it make sense to make the BattleMesh more
playful? Would it be possible to maybe find not just one
challenge per year, but a set of challenges?

Maybe we could ask around in our communities (and companies?)
whether there are some people with both a little mesh networking
and CtF like experiences who would like to help creating something
like a BattleMesh Test VM to run on some laptops (connected to
the testbed nodes). And a ranking server which would gather
results, give points, some little achievement icons like kids
are used to from their video consoles these days :-), some hard
challenges which accumulate/double bonus points for every year
they are not solved.

Ideally, the firmware teams would be able to specify and
standardize the interface in a way that the Test VM team would
not need to know anything about the firmware internals.

Regards, Linus

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoparty
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wargame_%28hacking%29