a network far away, dns solutions, and google summer of code.

[ARTHUR WOLF]

Hi.

First of all excuse me for my bad english.

Ok, so. Here in Belgium, we have a wireless mesh network, called "Citizen
Network" ( http://www.reseaucitoyen.be/wiki/index.php/Accueil ), wich looks
lots like urs in Seattle.
We have about 50 nodes, with almost 20 nodes 24h/24 connected, and some
little splitted networks of about 2 or 3 nodes around. (
http://arthur.wolf.free.fr for a little map ).
We use OLSR for routing, Ad-Hoc mode, and we are beginning to use 5Ghz.
The project goals and philosophy, translated in ensglish, is in fact ecactly
just the same as whats written on Seattle Wireless frontpage.
So this was to introduce the network.

One of the long time problem here is domain name resolution.
Having one centralized DNS server is against the philosophy of the project
in wich no node can be more important than another node.

So i'm actually coding a Peer 2 peer DNS system, with dns server sharing
hosts information, and a simple interface for poeple to modify their own
domain name etc ...

Another long time problem was IP allocation.
As we dont want any ip list centralised somewhere , we here use ips
calculated on the last 3 numbers of the Mac Adress ( 00:11:22:33:44:55
becomes 10.3.4.5 ) , but even with this system, we can have ip collisions (
hyppotetically )
So with the project of p2p dns, i'm adding a dhcp server provinding adresses
calculated from the macadress, but verifying first it's not already in use,
and always gining an interface the same ip.

A small web interface is to be added to the project too, to manage
configuration ( both peer and client ), and to be used as a portal.
The whole project is coded in Perl, and will be ported on Linux, Windows,
OpenWRt, and maybe BSD. ( you can find a ( not up to date ) page describing
a little of the project at http://www.reseaucitoyen.be/wiki/index.php/Acdc (
will be soon translated ) )

Ok, so what i'm here to ask you poeple for, is Google Summer of Code (
http://code.google.com/soc/ ).
As i'm a student, i want to participate in it, but cant find any Mentor
organisation searching for things like my project.
Poeple here in Belgium dont want to do it cause of philosophical problems (
you must choose someone to represent the project ).

If you are interrest in my project, and if u see no problem with choosing
someone to represent ur project at GSoC, it would be nice to do it :)
Inscriptions closes on May 1, so please answer quicly if you are
interrested.

Thanks.

Arthur.

( ps : of course the whole thing is free, and btw earns 500$ to the
mentoring organisation in case of success ).
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.seattlewireless.net/pipermail/talk/attachments/20060424/02977bd9/attachment.html