[wsfii-discuss] guifi.net project in India

[Ramon Roca]

I don't know in depth about Orangemesh/Openmesh.com

By the first look, speaking in general terms, our platform intends to 
build the mesh at application level, and not rely to a certain 
technology/firmware or hardware, instead tries to support as many of 
them as possible and be aligned to what's widely available in a given 
point at the market for end users.

I would say that is an evolution of the systems which were taking care 
of websites to support wireless communities, with things like forums, 
news, manage network ranges allocations, maps and LOS tools and 
publishing network information, but now including much more 
functionality. The closest example I've seen of this type of apps is we 
wind, used in Athens.

To give you some examples, for instance and about the IP provisioning, 
is not simply about provisioning an addres to the user or to the router, 
is both. An end user can come to the website, describe what the network 
segment he is providing by filling simple forms, and by doing that, get 
IP's and configuration scripts to excuted at the routers but without 
having to know about dynamic protocols or require assistance from a 
human network administrator.

The platform also has a distributed application to monitor the network 
in real time from several "graph servers", to enhance the kind of 
functionality which was typically provided by applications like cacti or 
nagios, but with the need to scale and unassisted from network 
administrators. I.e. if you go to a page of a certain node, you'll have 
that information available, as well as capabilities to check things like 
pings, traceroutes, as well to find "soft" routes and display them over 
the maps, as en example go to http://guifi.net/cepa, which is one node 
with many connections, so you can play with all the available links.

Regarding to the user provisioning for portals, or captive portals, has 
also an application for doing so, also managed by the users itself, and 
this database can be extracted to virtually any portal system by text 
replicas for simple "passwd" files to be used simply in systems with a 
squid proxy, or extracted in LDIF format to setup directories to be 
published on other protocols like radius.

At the end, the platform provides a common framework which have enabled 
many communities around the region in Catalonia to vertebrate a large 
network at regional scale. For several reasons (language, map 
availability, etc...) wasn't really usable out of the region. Given the 
vast functionality it has, makes sense for such kind of applications to 
try if can be adopted internationally, and by doing so, have a wider 
community support for enhancing it.




En/na wlanmac ha escrit:
> Hi Ramon,
>
> Could you tell me more about the 'platform'? 
>
> I took a look at the SVN repository. To me, it looks like something
> similar to OrangeMesh (which similar to the system Open-mesh.com runs),
> except yours is for Drupal. 
>
> I read that the platform includes IP provisioning. Is that to provision
> IPs to the routers or to the users? 
>
> If you haven't seen them already, you might be interested in the
> following open-source resources for captive portal and RADIUS based
> access provisioning and accounting:
>
> http://drupal.org/project/Hotspot
> http://coova.org/wiki/index.php/CoovaChilli
>
> Best regards,
> David
>
> On Mon, 2008-10-27 at 22:33 +0100, Ramon Roca wrote:
>   
>> Hi all,
>>
>> As some of you already know, at guifi.net we are looking to enable our 
>> platform to be able to support other geographies and languages but 
>> reusing the same technology and platform we have developed for the last 
>> years. We've done a hard jof for this during the last months, and still 
>> some to complete, however we feel that we are getting somewhat ready. 
>> After that, we've been looking for international project to run PoC to 
>> see if this concept of deployment by using self-provisioning oriented to 
>> end users is replicable.
>>
>> We're pleased to confirm that we are going to start a project to start 
>> an open network in Bangalore/India in cooperation with some NGO's.
>>
>> See more details on this at:
>> http://guifi.net/en/node/17764
>>
>> I know that some of you are from India. Note that we might need 
>> cooperation from local people as soon as we advance on the project, i.e. 
>> for logistics or getting involved with local communities. Please feel 
>> free to get involved if someone interested, start posting at our renewed 
>> website in english, tell us, etc etc... We are in the hope that by this 
>> we can empower other local initiatives in the area as we did in Catalonia.
>>
>> We plan also to launch an english mailing list very soon, and change the 
>> server and its location to get better performance to the internet.
>>
>> We're in the hope to launch soon another project for the Sahara refugee 
>> camps in Africa, with the help of some of the freifunk people, and also 
>> open to cooperate with existing communities the world interested in 
>> embracing and enhancing the platform.
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
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