[isf-wifidog] Fwd: [wsfii-discuss] Re: CUWiN follow-up...

Jeu 13 Oct 13:13:05 EDT 2005

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sascha Meinrath <sascha at ucimc.org>
Date: Oct 13, 2005 1:10 PM
Subject: [wsfii-discuss] Re: CUWiN follow-up...
To: Jo Walsh <jo at frot.org>
Cc: David Young <dyoung at pobox.com>, wsfii-discuss at lists.okfn.org, Paul
Smith <paul at cnt.org>, Bill Comisky <bcomisky at pobox.com>

Hi Jo (et al.),

I've cc-ed Dave Young, Paul Smith, and Bill Comisky into the conversation since
CUWiN has been wrestling with some of the same ideas/hassles/etc.  I'm just back
from Washington, DC where Bill and I did a CUWiN/WiFiDog integrated deployment
covering Farragut Park -- there's definitely a lot of synergy between the
technologies.  CUWiN's now having to turn down deployment opportunities because
the technology is catching on faster than we can keep up with -- to me, this
means that there's a huge (and growing) amount of interest in turn-key,
plug-and-play, wireless networking technologies.

The next 6-12 months will be critical in getting pilot sites up (beyond our own
communities) that we can point to as success stories.  Right now we're working
with folks setting up CUWiN networks in Algiers (New Orleans), Tribal Digital
Village (near San Diego), Ghana, South Africa, and Brazil, to name just a few
locations -- the problem is, these systems are still not identical replacements
for commercial products (because they don't have authentication/captive portals
built in, bandwidth-shaping, etc.).  So tackling some of these features and
getting them integrated is a high priority for us; likewise distributed storage
(a la Alexei's 'Hive Networks') and applications/services is also of great
interest.

I'd be interested in hearing what people thing the highest priority next steps
might be.

--Sascha

Jo Walsh wrote:
> dear Sascha,
> (i hope you don't mind me cc-ing this to the Wsfii list but typing out
> all the relevant parties was taking too long)
>
> On Wed, Oct 12, 2005 at 05:31:39PM -0500, Sascha Meinrath wrote:
>
>>Basically, I'm interested in CUWiN integration of "best of" technologies.
>>-- and I want to find folks who aren't ego-driven, but are
>>rather interested in building cross-project collaborations, standardizing,
>>and partnering on development.  Right now I'm especially interested in
>>distributed multimedia access and production.  Anyway, is there any way I
>>can get a brain dump on what you're all up to, visions for the future, etc.
>>etc. etc.?
>
> As wirelesslondon, Saul and i have done a kind of "research integration".
> Last year i wrote a location portal service which used nocatsplash as
> a client, then i met Mike and Francois from Ile Sans Fil the same
> weekend as Saul was in Denmark working with the Freifunk firmware for
> OLSR mesh on openWRT for the first time.
>
> So we have been trying to build a hybrid of the wifidog client against
> my auth-less portal server on a Freifunk mesh. We found an interesting
> situation where mesh nodes would attempt to splash each other and not
> let your packets out, BMS wrote a script that will fix this if run on
> a cron; we need to incorporate this into a firmware distribution.
>
> I don't want to reinvent the wifidog auth server. I think it is facing
> rearchitecture after the next stable release. I'm writing a machine
> interface to the interesting bits of my application, which a wifidog
> auth server can just aggregate, it has some very nice and flexible and
> underused feed scheduling in there.
>
> As i understand it Freifunk run a managed mesh network by doing a
> custom autogeneration of a firmware image with IP settings etc. Ile
> Sans Fil have a related setup where i think a script is grabbed from
> the web and run on the WRT or something crazy like that. FF kindly
> made us a custom 'wlon' image that points to our portal server (actually
> to the older slightly broken version that i really want to replace).
> We don't have a planned or organised network here though i think we
> have a big potential one. http://comwifinet.org/ have been helping
> reify our research practise a lot.
>
> Dana and Rob(?) NYCWireless have been researching the FFF/Wifidog
> hybrid setup too. I want to make sure they have access to a nice local
> spatial information system, there is a transport planning project which
> i'd like to hook them into but that is probably a different braindump.
>
> Dana talked of the need for both a stable firmware image generator which
> incorporates the whole 'stack' and can build images for users with set
> configuration; and also a lot more documentation work on both wifidog
> and freifunk to really spell it all out for network builders.
> I would like to see an abstract auth specification which nocatsplash /
> chilispot can offer support for. I would like to see http://openid.net
> or something like it be incorporated in this.
>
> Next step is somewhere towards Alexei's 'Hive Networks', to start
> with a local storage to which the portal gives you access and which
> syndicates information deemed of interest to the node users. Then the
> applications that run in spaces become richer as more context and
> capacity is available.
> http://81.168.51.180/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page
> http://rixc.lv/reader/txt/txt.php?id=182&l=en&raw=1
>
> Then, i don't know, we really need to get more artists involved.
> We've been trying to build free information infrastructure for NODE.London,
> a distributed 'media arts festival', the idea is each node has an
> event-driven local information portal and some have media exchange
> machines, burnstations. This is planned for March, and Wsfii.London was
> incorporated in a bootstrap phase in Oktober.
>
> -jo

--
Sascha Meinrath
Policy Analyst    *  Project Coordinator  *  President
Free Press       *** CU Wireless Network *** Acorn Active Media
www.freepress.net *  www.cuwireless.net   *  www.acornactivemedia.com

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