[Battlemesh] WBMv8 -- a personal perspective

[Benjamin Henrion]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2015 at 4:21 PM, Thijs van Veen <dicht at operamail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Just to add in my thoughts.
>
> First of all, the shell scripts Henning and I wrote are very simple.
> I thought we'd be doing much more difficult stuff, but it all turned out
> pretty basic.
> I hope people will learn from this and understand that it doesn't take a
> genius to help out, just some focus.
>
> WiBed can be a very valuable tool to help us test things on a larger
> scale and get more info from the nodes.
> This is one of the reasons I offered Manos to help out with getting
> WiBed up and running before the next Battlemesh.
>
> I'm pretty sure we can save a lot of issues just by grabbing the latest
> stable versions and freeze that configuration for testing.
> It's great to have this drive for testing the latest versions, but
> please let us keep this seperate from the controlled testing
> environment.
> Any bugfixes after the frozen configuration should be acknowledged in
> the discussion of the testresults.
>
> What I would like to see next year is basically three things:
>
> 1. A backup manual solution (possibly based on the scripts Henning and I
> wrote);
> 2. A WiBed setup with stable versions of OpenWRT and the protocols to be
> tested;
> 3. A WiBed setup with the bleeding edge versions of OpenWRT and the
> protocols.
>
> All of this of course includes the protocol configurations, which may
> depend on the test scenarios.
> You can expect an email from me about a month before the event to gather
> which scenarios we want to test and how we should configure the
> protocols for these scenarios.

Most of those problems would vaporize if the routers used at WBM would
be part of a permanent testbed the rest of the year:

http://battlemesh.org/BattleMeshV3.3/PermanentTestBed

I am currently investigating ways to switch on/off those routers on
USB mobile phone batteries via a side control channel hooked up to
some arduino or similar. Serial port of the device could also be
exposed through this control channel, which might be via wifi or
433mhz or another frequency, or via long cables.

I also do not like indoor tests because of the amount of reflections
involved compared to outdoor use.

--
Benjamin Henrion <bhenrion at ffii.org>
FFII Brussels - +32-484-566109 - +32-2-4148403
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