Hi all,

We are a small co-op wireless community; the goal of the community is a decentralized network that grows, configure and heal itself without too many IT guys but, above all, without telcos. In priority order: reliability, then performances.
I'm the "IT guy" of the community and I'd like to plan a migration from Sveasoft firmwares to OpenWRT as soon as possible, beacouse I don't like their business model. I used to pay 20$/y to support the developers in doing a sort of mankind's treasure, not a company's business. PLEASE HELP!!!!

As I write our WRTs (7 up and running, 3 up to come, many others waiting) are connected with a feature called by Sveasoft "p2p wds" that means:

Node1: br0=lan+wlan clients on 192.168.1.0/24, wds0.2 on 10.1.2.1/30, wds0.3 on 10.1.3.1/30
Node2: br0=lan+wlan clients on 192.168.2.0/24, wds0.2 on 10.1.2.2/30, wds0.3 on 10.2.3.1/30
Node3: br0=lan+wlan clients on 192.168.3.0/24, wds0.2 on 10.1.3.2/30, wds0.3 on 10.2.3.2/30
and so on...

The routing is OSPF, all the lan+wlan traffic is shaped with QoS (voip+smb needed) and we have two internet gateways on two nodes WRT's WAN ports. Equipment is WRT54G v2.0 and v2.2, we have 1.5MByte/s on every link (300-900 meters).
Configuration was still incomplete but I'd like to reach redundancy and load balancing. Now I prefer to first bring everything on OpenWRT and then continue developing on it.

While waiting for 3 new WRTs to make a test lab, I searched the forums and finally found this message where mbm suggested, by playing with bridges and vlans, a way to have 1 radio serving both wds links and clients:

http://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?pid=7841#p7841

but, as I can understand, I should have STP once I create redundant links and I couldn't find any info about enabling stp!

Is it possible to migrate to OpenWRT mantaining the nodes indipendant (node subnet, node dhcp, etc), having link redundancy and load balancing on internal routes and internet routes?
Is it possible to change OSPF with OSLR to take advantage of the Link Quality features?
Is it possible to mount a distributed and redundant filesystem on WRTs so that I could avoid using a server for small additional services? (thinking at coda; maybe fuse?)

(Please correct me if I'm wrong)

ciao

Wallace78

Enabling stp on bridge is quite simple :

brctl stp <bridge name> on

This avoid creating a kind of "circuit" on all your links, and the well known problems it causes

Good luck in your migration and do not hesitate to post here

You can make this change survive reboots by setting the "lan_stp" nvram variable :

nvram set lan_stp=1
nvram commit

This will enable stp (see /sbin/ifup) if lan and wireless are bridged

Thank you RItalMan and Nico,

I'll surely try that setup (lan wds with stp) before going to mesh it beacouse it is simpler ("Make it sumple stupid!" continue to ripeat myself when working).

But my goal is to have fully l2 and l3 indipendant links: so, no br0 (and no stp needed) and an w.x.y.z/30 for every wds0.x interface. Then have OSPF (OSLR if possible) to automagically set up the routes, make the mesh fault tolerant and manage load balancing.

My major problems are:

1) how to avoid hotplug to put wds0.X interfaces in br0? Or, as a workaround: can i remove them from br0 at boot time or they are built/destroyed everytime the radio link is established?
(EDIT: mbm says this in http://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?pid=6707#p6707 but it is quite cryptic)

2) Can I use OSLR instead of OSPF to reach failover/load balancing and add (over the actual ospf setup) Link Quality feature that OSLR have (can't remember the name of the plugin)?

Regards,

Wallace

(Last edited by Wallace78 on 11 Jul 2005, 23:59)

Have you looked at freifunk ? its openwrt with olsr

http://ff-firmware.sourceforge.net/

Yep, but they use Ad-Hoc mode; as far as I can understand (I can't speak german, I found only one english page there) their educational goal was manet oriented... Our goal is to provide a self configuring, self building, self healing, decentralized cheap network... the holy graal...

I prefer to think to a WDS setup to save one radio each node and have lower troughput, instead of implementing an Ad-Hoc mesh. And I need much much work to understand everything and be able to plan, develop and deploy a custom solution as SWON (Aladin, etc) and others (wildcat) did... I'm pretty newbie on wireless, have limited development skills and find hard also to get the clue on these advanced networking matters!
Moreover there's no business at all behind my community; nor willing to pay from users, neither someone paying for development and no big saves on internet and phone bills...

I want to go from Sveasoft to OpenWRT even it needs more work, beacouse I believe in the Open philosophy but can't make much kilometers all by myself
I know I'll have to work on it for long time, but I prefer hard work to go back to a quick 'n' dirty Sveasoft's firmware.

In this scenario a wds setup, with ospf, some custom bash scripts, maybe frottle, Aladin and OSLR are a better choice. IMHO.
Can OSLR run on non-adhoc mesh networks built on routed wds links?

Questions are more and more everyday... I hope to quickly clear some of them as soon as I get the 3-APs' testbed and to not find too many seg faults...

Thanks for your tip!

Wallace78

Ok may be try this (may or may not work with WPA but WEP=yes its work)
http://doctormojo.com/wrt54g/
http://openwrt.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=152

if Openwrt is hard for you, then :-
*  and DD WRT 1 AP and all other wrt's are client mode also work well even with WPA-PSK (fast throughput)
*  Hyperwrt WDS<->WDS WPA-PSK work too. (very easy setup) (almost fast as DD WRT)

need help ? feel free
Wj

For those migrating from Sveasoft then the following article may be of interest - I have modified the hotplug script to use existing sveasoft nvram variables - it should bring up your p2p links just as sveasoft does.

http://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=3494

I am going to start on quagga ospf conversion aswell. i.e to generate ospfd.conf from the Sveasoft nvram vars just as the original.  The aim will be to be able to flash openwrt on to an existing Alchemy build router, download a couple of scripts and the router will behave like it had under the Sveasoft firmware.

Just so that there is no misunderstanding, I am not knocking Sveasoft in any way - infact I am a big supporter.  However, there are applications where the Minimalist openwrt framework is the better choice.

I believe it is possible to support both firmwares without being fanatically partisan to either.

KR's

Mark