Quick Mesh Project

After some extra weeks of testing, qMp 3.0 codenamed Clearance is ready to download.

In this stable release, the OpenWrt-routing packages feed -on which the firmware is based- has been copied to qMp's repositories and freezed to its current status.

qMp v3 Clearance is tested to work in the following devices:

• Ubiquiti NanoStation M2 / M5
  • LAN/LAN+Mesh/WAN/WAN+Mesh/Mesh modes on wired ports eth0 and eth1
  • AP/AP+Mesh/Mesh modes on wireless interface wlan0
• Ubiquiti NanoStation Loco M2 / M5
  • LAN/LAN+Mesh/WAN/WAN+Mesh/Mesh modes on wired port eth0
  • AP/AP+Mesh/Mesh modes on wireless interface wlan0
• Ubiquiti Rocket
  • LAN/LAN+Mesh/WAN/WAN+Mesh/Mesh modes on wired port eth0
  • AP/AP+Mesh/Mesh modes on wireless interface wlan0
• Ubiquiti NanoBridge M2 / M5
  • LAN/LAN+Mesh/WAN/WAN+Mesh/Mesh modes on wired port eth0
  • AP/AP+Mesh/Mesh modes on wireless interface wlan0
• TP-Link TL-WDR4300
  • LAN/WAN modes on wired blue/yellow ports, Mesh mode only available on last yellow port
  • AP/AP+Mesh/Mesh modes on wireless interfaces wlan0 and wlan1
• TP-Link TL-WR841n-v8
  • LAN/LAN+Mesh/WAN/WAN+Mesh/Mesh modes on wired port eth0 (blue)
  • LAN/WAN/Mesh modes on wired port eth1 (yellow)
  • AP/AP+Mesh/Mesh modes on wireless interface wlan0
• PC Engines Alix boards
  • LAN/LAN+Mesh/WAN/WAN+Mesh/Mesh modes on wired ports eth0 and eth1
  • AP/AP+Mesh/Mesh on wireless interfaces installed on mini-PCI slots

Changelog from previous release (v3.0-RC3):

• Fixed BMX6 status page

Precompiled images will be available at http://fw.qmp.cat/Releases/archive/3.0-Clearance. Please report any bugs you might find.

 This year, the Google Summer of Code and FreiFunk have given to Guifi.net and QMP communities the opportunity to develope a project in this event. This project is: BGP/Bird integration with OpenWRT and QMP.

 

A brief description of the project

    Most of the community networks run dynamic routing protocols (OLSR, BMX6, BATMAN-ADV, etc.) with non-dynamic ones (BGP, OSPF, etc.). Guifi.net (BGP) and QMP (BMX6) are a scenario where this collision of metrics and routes happens.

     Furthermore, these communities are using Quagga for the BGP routing, which is a complex and oversized tool for the type of nodes that will work with it. For these kind of nodes, Bird is a really lightweight BGP daemon that is still not well supported to be used easily by the community (it does not have an easy and graphical configuration system yet).

 

    This project will contribute with:

1st Block: Adapting Bird to fit into QMP firmware. (1 month)

• Bird daemon improvements (3 weeks)

  • Give to Bird integration with OpenWRT: Add support for UCI configuration. Thus, will ease the configuring process and become closer to non-expert users.

  • Improve Bird UCI configuration adding LUCI support (web graphical interface). Adding a graphical user-friendly interface and the necessary tools to automate hardest processes of the configuration, non-expert community users could find this daemon as an easy to use routing tool.

• Adapt Bird daemont to QMP (1 week)

  • Once working on OpenWRT and with an easy ‘to put on work’ configuration, add integration with the QMP firmware owing to replace Quagga’s routing functions in frontier nodes of the QMP network

 

2n Block: Automate the translations of routes and metrics between a non-dynamic routing protocol and a dynamic one. (~2 months)

• Creation of a routes and metrics exchange system (7 weeks)

  • Study and build an exchange system for metrics and routes between BGP (from Guifi.net) and BMX6 (from QMP).

  • Test and debug this solution in the real scenario (Guifi.net-QMP).

 

3rd Block: Project basic feedback and documentation (1 week)

• Documentation, user support&feedback and results presentation.

 

About the author

    I am Eloi Carbó, a Computer Science student specialized in Information Technology in the UPC of Barcelona. Currently I am working on my Final Degree dissertation: UPC CN-A testbed mesh network deployment, monitoring and validation. Using the Wibed Platform developed by the CONFINE Project [Wibed].

 

About the project collaborators

    The project tutors are Roger Baig (fundació Guifi.net) and Axel Neumann (Freifunk and BMX6) and the special collaboration of Pau Escrich (fundació Guifi.net and QMP Project).

 

During this week we've performed some important steps towards the release of qMp v3.0, codenamed Clearance.

During the last months, many users have demanded a "stable" release of qMp, so that they could flash their devices and forget about updating them every now and then with the latest firmware compilation. In addition, since some weeks ago, the "testing" branch seemed to be stable enough, with the most popular devices tested to work. For these reasons, today we've frozen "testing" branch and moved it to "master".

The previous release, that was almost one year old, has been moved to a branch called "v2-ratafia". During this time qMp and BMX6 have evolved a lot, so the previous "master" branch was mainly deprecated.

qMp v3 Clearance is in RC1. As usually, precompiled images will be available at http://fw.qmp.cat (targets will be appearing in the following hours). Please, feel free to test it and give us any suggestions.