[isf-wifidog] Face to face design meeting for wifidog gateway 2.0

[Benoit Grégoire]

Since there are finally more individuals interested in actively working on the 
next generation of the gateway, it is time for a face to face meeting to 
bootstrap the process.

Date Sunday 11h AM, March 30th
7615 de Chateaubriand #4, Montréal, (Jean-Talon Metro)
A projector and whiteboard will be available.  There is a coffe maker, but you 
need to bring your own grinded coffee.

Context:  The gateway is stable and it's design has served us very well for a 
long time.  Much of that design is still good, and in some cases even have to 
be reinforced (we strayed from our initial goal of making it integrate well 
with firewalls, which is causing major headaches for people running 
transparent proxies on the same machine)

However, some additional features cannot be done without a protocol redesign:  
walled garden, moving MAC whitelist to the auth server, supporting devices 
without a web browser, congestion management.  Furthermore, the protocol is 
currently needlessly chatty.

Version 2 of the protocol will be documented here 
http://dev.wifidog.org/wiki/doc/developer/WiFiDogProtocol_V2

Off course changing the protocol is only half the story, many parts of the 
gateway will need major refactoring.  Some will even need complete rewrites.  

Off course as everybody should know, at the same time there are three major 
patchsets that are currently in the process of being integrated into the 
gateway:  
-One by David Young (BSD support)
-One by Coova (WSPr support, DHCP auth trigger)
-One branch from Mina to be merged (Captive DNS)

Everybody needs to be aware of everybody elses work to avoid regression, and 
this time we must not find ourselves in the situation where protocol and 
design documentation is written after coding is complete, and by different 
people. 

Architecture design will be documented here 
http://dev.wifidog.org/wiki/doc/developer/WiFiDog_V2
In the meantime 
If anyone from outside of Montreal can make it, we'll be sure to find you 
confortable and free places to stay if you need it.
-- 
Benoit Grégoire
Technologies Coeus inc.