Optimized Link State Routing
Contents
Cross Platform Meshy goodness.. With RFC and all that (we do use ETX extension though, so vanilla RFC olsr doesn't work). To join in the fun, go to http://olsr.org and grab a binary for your operating system. OLSR runs on Windows, OSX, Linux, FreeBSD, and a few other platforms. You can even run OLSR on your LinksysWrt54g. We've been experimenting with OLSR as a simple way to get on the network, and move routes around. Even if your node is a disconnected DxNode, running OLSR is a good thing to do. It doesn't require a lot of setup or cpu, and it makes getting routed connections to your node a piece of cake.
Mind Camp
We will be running a small-medium sized OLSR network at http://seattlemind.com/ Seattle Mind Camp the weekend of November 5th. If you want to get in on the free fun, go register now, there are only 150 slots.
Rob has a writeup of how things went on his blog. http://nocat.net/~rob/events/mindcamp05.html
Hack Night Testing
At HackNight, we built a small mesh (8 machines through the course of the night) with a 1xRTT gateway
- 15" Powerbook, 12" G3 iBook, 12" Powerbook, 12" G4 iBook all running OSX
Soekris4511 (TrainNode) and Soekris4826 (Battery Powered) running MetrixPebble Windows XP laptop, Windows 98 Laptop
After sorting out the initial setup and NAT issues, nearly everything meshed up and exchanged routes. The windows 98 laptop would not come up on the mesh, it looked like it wasn't finding it's interfaces correctly and was reporting the interface as 0.0.0.0. We attempted to run olsr.exe manually but it complained that there was no c:\windows\olsrd.conf and would not continue. We copied the conf from a working machine, but were unsure as to the interface name (it's certainly not eth0 or en1). Does anyone know what you call an interface that is listed as "2 Network adaptor" by ipconfig? putting that in caused the same error.
does anyone else have a windows98 laptop to test this on?
Tonight (Nov 1, 2005) we tested out another small mesh with a few laptops and a couple of MetrixPebble machines. Our primary gateway was the cafe network, but when there were some problems with the dhcp server (the CHIC AP always goes down) we were able to add another slow gateway using a Bluetooth/GPRS connection.
Here's the routeviz:
Lake Union Network
We've also started running it at NodeOne and throughout the LakeUnion Network. If you can see a node, start running OLSR on your machine!
Here is a graphviz of the network. Updates every 5 minutes.
Downloads
Source http://www.olsr.org/releases/0.4/olsrd-0.4.9.tar.bz2
Windows binaries http://www.olsr.org/releases/0.4/packages/olsr-0.4.9-setup.exe
OSX Binaries http://www.fernsehsofa.de/olsr/
Linux Binaries (i386, ARM and MIPSEL) http://www.olsr.org/releases/0.4/packages/olsrd-0.4.9-bin_linux.tar.bz2
OpenWRT images http://www.freifunk.net/wiki/FreifunkFirmwareEnglish
More Information
Q & A
Q: Will OLSR run on a non-mesh topology where each node has 2 interfaces, one in Master, and one in Client, and each client connects to the next node's master interface, and so on?
A: Yes.
Q: Do you have to multiple daemons of OLSR for multiple interfaces? Are there sample configs for this setup?
A: If you specify multiple interfaces in the config file, you will have multiple olsrd processes in your tree. You do not need to start them up individually.
Q: How do I specify the IP ranges of my aliases? ie. wlan0:0, wlan0:1 ... OLSR seemed to choke when I tried specifying them in the interfaces declaration in the .conf
A: They should all be defined under HNA4, these are the ranges that get announced.
