[WLANware] Freifunk Gui to conqueer the world

[Dan Flett]

Hi all,

Michael makes a couple of good points.  Freifunk-style mesh networks have 
the advantage of being governed by people from the area the network is in - 
FON is controlled by a corporation from another country.  FON is a 
benevolent dictatorship - so far so good - I've been reading their blogs and 
they express an interest in OLSR meshing, so in future FON may even be 
interoperable with local free community networks.  Better to cooperate to 
share radio spectrum than to compete and interfere with each other.

Port-forwarding in the GUI would be handy for those who want to run servers 
"behind" their mesh router, rather than expose it directly to the network.  
Encouraging node-owners to provide services to the network makes the network 
more attractive, which in turn helps the network grow.  Which is a Good 
Thing (TM).

Here in Australia, there is some pretty opressive government regulation 
surrounding the distribution of Internet access across an unlicenced 
network.  So while we are free to create a city-wide Intranet, providing 
Internet access across that network is a legal problem.  I believe the 
problem would be reduced by putting a captive portal on the gateway - 
authentication and accounting for Internet access would be more likely to 
keep the authorities happy.  A captive portal is also important as a Public 
Relations exercise: it enables random strangers to find out about the 
network, which encourages further participation.  You could even use the 
splash page to sell more Freifunk boxes to help grow the network! :)

To encourage fast network growth, the network should be "sticky" - those who 
come into contact with it should be so impressed by it that they want to 
keep using it and want to help it grow.  Making it easy and cheap to use, 
and build, will help it grow as fast as possible.

We at Melbourne Wireless have been working on our own small captive portal 
Internet gateway package.

You can get the source code and OpenWRT mipsel ipk package here:
http://www.melbournewireless.org.au/files/wrt54/Packages/

It is called MWHotspot.  Anyone interested in using/testing/developing it 
should email me.  It authenticates against the Melbourne Wireless membership 
database, but could easily be adapted for other groups.

And I agree, having to reboot the box isn't a big problem for me.  Friefunk 
boxes, like all routers, spend 99.9% of their time unattended, doing their 
job and 0.1% of their time being configured.  Once they are configured, they 
can be left alone, so I don't see the necessity to reboot as being a real 
issue.

Cheers,

Dan

>no need to conquer something. FON is for sharing a private internet access
>with other privates (accepting the FON-terms-of-trade to overcome own
>dumbness in configuring such a thing), Freifunk is for city wide meshing.
>Different audience. Yes - there is some congruence of course.
>
>- PortFW: Dunno if I can grab that. Need to ask the author and make a
>   translatable ipk out of it. Normally same workload as re-writing that
>stuff.
>   Not this month.
>
>- Who needs wifidog in an unencrypted free mesh environment? You can
>    use iptables and fetch a copy of the freifunk-gateway-??.ipk for a 
>config
>    sample to get the 404-extra-httpd going (additional
>"S:cgi-bin-mystuff.htm"
>    in the busybox httpd.config file). Yes - that is not drag-n-drop.
>
>- And: I am very lazy. Restart is necessary because reconfiguration without
>   restarts costs me a lot of devel time but saves only 5 mins. per average
>user
>   for his/her config experience. I like to get things going, but need to
>optimize
>   my time ressources always. So that's prio #99 (there are 98 other things
>on
>   the todo).
>
>HTH Sven-Ola
>
>""michel memeteau"" <michel.memeteau at gmail.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
>news:c7fe8b8c0606150154k5d0f85dds327149d493babdba at mail.gmail.com...
>Hi , I'm from http://wireless-fr.org  France meeting point for free wifi
>networks ,
>
>Two things are keeping freifunk from spreading over FON and other 
>commercial
>initiative :
>
>
>It miss the port forwarding GUI  (
>https://wiki.funkfeuer.at/index.php?title=Port-Forwarding_unter_FreiFunk is
>working on )
>No integréted GUI to configure Wifidog ( we are working on
>http://forum.wireless-fr.org/viewtopic.php?pid=64#p64 )
>
>We need to restart for each changes ( can't we avoid that as in Webif ? )
>
>I think PPPOE should ne intégrated by default ....
>
>How can we work all together to make this in the next freifunk release or 
>at
>least make the ipks together and add them to the main tree ? We want to 
>help
>and I want to give a functionnal alternative to those FON guys .....
>
>Cheers all ...
>
>
>
>------------------------------------------------------->%
>Michel memeteau
>sip:17476005010 at proxy01.sipphone.com
>0491886375 0624808051
>jabber : freechelmi at jabber.fr
>
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>WLANware mailing list
>WLANware at freifunk.net
>https://freifunk.net/mailman/listinfo/wlanware
>
>_______________________________________________
>WLANware mailing list
>WLANware at freifunk.net
>https://freifunk.net/mailman/listinfo/wlanware