Post TU Comms and Networking

[River Song]

I’m going to show you how I built my first mesh. However, unless we cover some principles and I show you how I got here, it won’t make much sense and will remain “toys for the boys” (and girlz)

I’ve always been interested in the communications world. When I was a kid, I belonged to the local amateur radio club but frankly I just didn’t have the money for this hobby. My interest was always there though and later on in life, I built a career in data communications. (I’ve since given that up around 20 years ago to do something else and I’ve forgotten so much so I have to start again).

The other thing I remember is that when we had civil defence (that dates me !!!), I was always interested in the comms side rather than blood and bandages.

So – my headline is as follows: “Building Resilient Communication Networks in Pear Shaped Times”

I’m going to number these paragraphs. Forgive me if the nomenclature seems a bit laboured but it helps me think and express my thoughts.


1. The Landscape.
Whilst some networks might be up and running, it is safer to assume. For planning purposes that the Internet has gone. I know that it was designed so that even if one area was taken out by a nuclear strike, it would reroute – etc etc etc.
The trouble with the Internet is that it is ‘owned’ by ‘the man’. Whatever your political persuasion, left or right, or ‘sod-em-all’, the Internet is not secure.
‘The Man’ can shut it down at any time and will. Add to that equation and we have power outages etc.

That leaves us with Phones, cellphones (mobiles), Smart Phones, Pads and computers without Internet.

The Phone (Landline) network will be functionally dead in the water.
The cellphone network will be so blocked that UK Government will need to instigate MTPAS (Telecommunications Privileged Access Scheme). Emergency services and some first responders will have SIM cards with a privilege level of 12, 13 or 14. These are the only ones likely to be able to make calls. Smart Phones, Pads and computers all have 802 WIFI even if there is nothing to connect to …… but this is where we step in.

2. An Unlikely Source of Inspiration.
Whilst surfing around the web I came across some material from “Occupy Wall Street”. I don’t usually take my inspiration from the left, but if I forget their politics and focus on the tech, there’s some good stuff. (Same as Mother Earth News).
“How VPNs Keep Occupy Wall Street Networks Up And Protesting”
http://www.fastcompany.com/1792974/how-v...protesting

This intrigued me so off I popped to the Free Network Foundation web site.

http://thefnf.org

The WIKI on this site is useful particularly the “FreedomStack Components”.
The ‘stack’ looks somewhat like this:

FreedomNode
FreedomNode >>>> FreedomTower >
FreedomNode |
>>>>>>>> FreedomLink
FreedomNode |
FreedomNode >>>> FreedomTower >
FreedomNode

The FreedomNode is a wireless router which acts as a node in the "neighborhood-scale" mesh network and as a downlink to the owner's LAN. The essentials here are that it has WIFI, can ‘mesh’ with other FreedomNodes and can link outside the Nodes themselves into a LAN or onto a ….

FreedomTowers are owned and operated by those that benefit from them. They benefit entire neighbourhoods – communities on the order of five to ten thousand individuals. FreedomTowers perform critical Layer 1 network operations, and help the neighbourhood mesh run efficiently. In addition to improving the throughput of Layer 1 connectivity, FreedomTowers participate in the Layer 2 regional mesh. This means that neighbourhoods can connect directly to one another, and that material peer-to-peer is not limited in scope to local communities.

So essentially, the tower is a way for a number of local meshes and nodes to communication at a greater distance – say to other collections of meshes and nodes. (This though is quite expensive and would probably need around £1500 for each tower --- it might be that at this level – radio might (might) come into its own.

I needed firstly to consider the local node and mesh and work at the first level before considering the next levels up.

When one looks at the specs for the FreedomNode at https://commons.thefnf.org/index.php/FreedomNode you can see the hardware base is a small form computer and the software base could be a number of different protocols. Now I’m rather a lazy bugger so I wondered whether you could buy these things ready built. Answer – Yes BUT …

The Mesh Potato (Groan). The Mesh Potato is a device for providing low-cost telephony and Internet in areas where alternative access either doesn’t exist or is too expensive. It is a marriage of a low-cost wireless access point (AP) capable of running a mesh networking protocol with an Analog Telephony Adapter (ATA). Originated in South Africa – well worth a look as I reckon that the UK will look like a 3rd world country after SHTF. The old model was $99 and the new one is $39 but it doesn’t have the telephony model. I reckon when its released it will be around $59. http://villagetelco.org/mesh-potato/

So these gave me some ideas and after some serious thought, I reckon that I’ll buy a couple of the Mesh Potatoes when the phone module is out.

Meantime … I examined the software modules and came up with this …….

3. My Implementation of the Mesh Node.

You’ve got to remember that I’m still in experimentation phase.
I dug out an old Dell Laptop (dusty … a few keys missing). I decided to use this as my hardware base and see where we went from there.

Software pointed me towards a number of different choices. I didn’t want to get into hacking source code and building my own Linux so went with Project Byzantium. http://project-byzantium.org/ The goal of Project Byzantium is to develop a communication system by which users can connect to each other and share information in the absence of convenient access to the Internet. This is done by setting up an ad-hic wireless mesh network that offers services which replace popular websites often used for this purpose. For my purposes, I wanted to use it as a communications hub.
Downloaded the Hybrid ISO image from Amazon S3 – (See the Byzantium Download Page). The Hybrid image is necessary to burn the system onto a USB Stick. This way I booted up the laptop directly from the USB Stick and up came a Linux + Byzantium and lo and behold, the mesh was running.

4. Testing.

When up and running, I opened a browser on the Linux and tried to get out on to the web. Nothing. Of course not. The WIFI is being used for the mesh and ‘inbound’ requests. Plugged a hardware Ethernet connection into the laptop and we had access to the Internet.

Left it running and went to the MAC. Checked the WIFI access points and “BYZANTIUM” could be seen. Ditto the PC Tower. Connected to Byzantium successfully and made sessions over the Internet which essentially means from the Mac to the Laptop Node via WIFI and then out of the Laptop to the web via Ethernet.

So it works.

5. Next Steps.

There remain some difficult issues such as bridging meshes over distances longer than the unaugmented maximum range of 802.11a/b/g/n. This may be done over radio. Byzantium does have embedded AX.25 Libraries and toolkit. There may be a better way.

What I would like to do is to see whether I can run this stuff on a non x86 platform. For example, OH has just bought me a Raspberry Pi. http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs. Single board computer that runs a Linux. However it’s not the usual x86 platform so there maybe some work. But it’s all fun.

I’ll keep you updated if anyone is at all interested.

Count it all joy ………..

Allons-y