[WLANware] Freifunk Google Summer of Code, my introduction and proposal

[Linus Lüssing]

Hi Philipp,

Great that you are interested in joining GSoC :). Your previous
experience with wireless community mesh networks would definitely
be helpful.

On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 07:44:35PM +0100, Philipp Psurek wrote:
> [...] and kill some bugs I’m dealing with every day using
> Freifunk.

Could you also imagine looking into batman-adv, too? It would
probably be a task where you would need to be prepared to not
seeing "immediate progress", the barrier of entry is quite high, I
think. Learning about various locking techniques, commonly used
kernel data structures and even setting up some sort of test bed
to be able to quickly make and test changes to the kernel module
will take several days to start with.

On the other hand, you would definitely learn a lot about
operating and embedded systems on the way which could be handy for
your studies and future :).


Or are there any other favourite bugs or tools to debug you
currently have in mind?

> * ad-hoc switching to the new batman-V protocol

Being able to migrate from one routing protocol to another in a
safe way is also a high priority item on the ToDo list of Gluon.
There are some ideas for an "autoupdater-ng" for Gluon and your
previous experience and ideas would probably suite that quite
well.

Afaik Matthias wanted to develop a new configuration
infrastructure for OpenWRT first which might result into a
"dependancy issue", in that this task might need to be finished
first before an autoupdater-ng could be started. So it seems
a bit too early for the "autoupdater-ng" for this GSoC - even 
though I personally would love to see this done as soon as
possible :).

If you are really interested in this, maybe we could have a quick
talk on IRC or phone with Matthias ak neoraider?


> * making some marginal node setting changes without breaking the users
> security

Again, would need a little more explanation of what you think
could be improved, I think. You can simply build a package and add
it, but maybe you have some ideas about how things could be done
easier? What were your experience with adding the custom changes you
wanted to make via a package?

> * a radio (batman-adv) based model car …

You mean RC cars? That sounds like fun, would definitely want to
join myself :D. I can already envision a swarm of "batmobiles"
roaming through the streets, avoiding obstacles and trying to
maintain a connected mesh cloud while trying to maximize coverage.

Not sure about the priority for a Freifunk GSoC project, though.

Regards, Linus