[wsfii-discuss] Re: CUWiN follow-up...

Thu Oct 13 02:16:18 UTC 2005

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