Mike, Thank you for the information!
To be clear, from what I understand from our discussions in the past you're topology looks like AP(802.11A + OLSRD) ----- AP (802.11B/G) ----- XO You have several AP(802.11A + OLSRD) acting as your backbone and they drop down to standard AP (802.11B/G) for connection to the XOs. Please let me know if this is correct. Out of curiosity: have you considered extending your OLSR network to the AP (802.11B/G)'s and installing the OLRSd binary on your XOs so the OLSR network can be extended beyond the school? Thanks, Reuben On Sep 2, 2010, at 6:36 PM, Mike Dawson wrote: > Hi, > > Sorry for my late reply to this. Actually we use OLSR in Afghanistan > to do our school networking like so: > > 1. An OLSR router (running openwrt Freifunk ; see freifunk.net ) > connects to the other routers in the school - that forms the backbone > on one network (e.g. channel 6) > > 2. A vanilla OpenWRT router actually connects to the XOs in the class. > We reduce the transmit power on that and run it on a different > channel (e.g. 1 or 11) > > The plus side is that you get a pure wireless system that does not > need network cabling / does not have cables getting killed by the > environment. The down side is you use more routers. I think > financially the costs are pretty similar. Also you can now use > 802.11n to get good speeds on the backbone. > > Seems to scale pretty nicely - we have 500 XOs in most schools. Note > though by design we are not using the collaboration on the school > server but rather just through the AP - teachers are not that enthused > by the prospect of kids being able to chat with anyone anytime. > > This has practically made doing the deployment in the field a bit > easier - though the firmware is not always perfect and not always > working out of the box with all hardware options. > > Regards, > > -Mike > > > > On 25/08/2010, Martin Langhoff <martin.langh...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 11:13 AM, Reuben K. Caron >> <reu...@laptop.org> wrote: >>> Where Mesh != 802.11s but rather an adhoc, self healing, self >>> organizing routable network. >> >> Cerebro gave a great working demo of what you describe. Don't know >> how >> they compare. >> >> I think it is perfectly feasible to achieve what you want... >> >> - to do it seamlessly and with polish will take a ton of work >> >> - very few users will actually benefit because the "under a tree" >> scenario covers IMHO most of our interesting use cases. >> >> People do talk about having a mesh that covers their whole town, and >> it's great dream but not achievable with our current constraints >> >> - town-wide meshes are made of stationary nodes >> >> - the "mesh" approaches we're discussing burn CPU / battery... >> >> - perennially power-starved users will focus on use, not on >> maintaining the communal mesh up >> >>> Imagine a world where Sugar on a Stick machines can communicate on >>> the >>> same network as an XO laptop >> >> We have that now with ad-hoc and infra. Limited but we have it. >> >>> A world where mesh capabilities are >>> hardware agnostic allowing anyone to bring up a mesh network by >>> booting a live cd. >> >> Mesh is pixie dust for most people. Your 'imagine' lines will make >> the >> imagine things that cannot be made to work _in the way people >> imagine_. Some meshy things can be made to work in a lab. Others just >> involve tradeoffs no sane user would take on... >> >> We've had bazillion threads about this, because mesh stokes passion. >> Problem is... even if you had the magical code right now working >> seamlessly... the cost/benefit ratio isn't good. >> >> cheers, >> >> >> >> m >> -- >> martin.langh...@gmail.com >> mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect >> - ask interesting questions >> - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first >> - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff >> _______________________________________________ >> Devel mailing list >> de...@lists.laptop.org >> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel >> _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep