A letter to the citizens of Worcester on the topic of creating a fully-decentralized mesh-network in Worcester and beyond.
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“The Internet has all the knowledge readily available for you, when you want it, but not when you need it, you do not own the servers that run the sites of knowldege.” ~Tristan B. Kildaire (Deavmi)
Hi I am Tristan B. Kildaire or also known by my online alias Deavmi, I am a Free Software (free as in “speech”, meaning that the code is open) developer at an organisation that I founded called Crowbar (https://crowbarhq.github.io), I love computer programming, it is a craft that is completely different from any other and is one that has a lot of structure and rules, which is something that I really like. I also have an interest in computer networking, although I hae no knowledge on that topic I do take quite an interest in it and would like to learn about it.
I started talking but what is my point, I haven’t even started talking about what I am here for, well here is the topic for you, “Meshnetworking in the town of Worcester and further…”, now if you do not know what I have just said in that above quotated topic let me then explain. Now being the modern age, you probably have some sort of networking in your house and probably have a wireless router (Access Point + Router), now when you connect up your laptop to this network via ethernet (a networking cable for computers) or via WLAN (wireless networking over-the-air), all of the traffic generated from your laptop, such as downloading you emails, browsing the web or chatting in some chat room like IRC or something, all the traffic is being pushed into the little box that processes all of the traffic, the router. When you recieve a WhatsApp your router had to receive it first and then pass it to your mobile device running WhatsApp, when you send a WhatsApp message your message gets sent first to your router and then to the WhatsApp servers. Now you see that is an over simplified version, there are routers ontop of routers, a whole gigantic heirachy, but say now, what if, one of those routers went down, say now it broke of was under maintenance, how do we get our traffic routed to the destination, well the sad sad answer is you don’t and that is kind of what you get for using a centralised router, anything that is centralised is not reliable as we have just seen. But Tristan, why are you making this point if surely centralisation is the only method that works. Well, no, it isn’t the only method that works, there are actually three methods, centralisation, distributed and decentralized, now the first two, “centralized” and “distributed” basically are very alike in that they can both fail you, yes, “distributed” networks can fail you less than a fully “centralised” network, but still they can both fail you, so the answer to this world-wide problem is “decentralization”, whereby each user is a client and a server of and to (respectively) the network, the both route traffic through the network and also can create traffic in the network.
Decentralization, Tristan that sounds like a really expensive and daunting task, well let’s clear that up for you, it can be really cheap, you don’t need to buy some really expensive router or anything and no it is not daunting, there are already serveral decentralized projects that exist all over the world, we have quite the choice to choose any decentralized routing protocol we want. Many devices can do mesh-routing, it is just all about the software that is currently running on them at the time, as usually the stock firmware (which is the pre-installed operating system that comes installed on a newly purchased router) has these features or lacks these features or even has these features but cannot extend much on those features, this is why we use OpenWRT (In my opinion I would prefer LibreWRT as it is comprised of 100% Free Software), as it has an amazing feature set and can install further functionality with the use of “plugins”.
Now I can also tell you something very important about why mesh-networking must exist and has existed, obviously it is to create an ad-hoc infrustructure when infrustructure is non-existent (it was initially used in the military), decentralization a.k.a mesh-networking is important for one little reason, trust.
Now setting up a meshnetwork was something that used to be very hard but several technologies such as Airmesh, Gluon, HSMM-Pi and Meshbox simplyfy the setup very easily for any end-user, which I honestly am, I might be a computer programmer but that does not mean that I have knowledge on networking, I have 0% knowlegde on that. Obviously mesh-networking is fun, so I really am endorsing you to play with all the different mesh-technologies and protocols, more than one meshnetwork will be awesome, as the more the merrier. There is a good amount of hardware available that works with Gluon, the software that is used for the Maxnet Mesh (which is a mesh-network that I started in Worcester based on the batman-adv routing protocol.) and it is an effortless process to get up and running, all is documented on the Maxnet Mesh site here, https://maxnetmesh.github.io . As for the other mesh-network I started in Worcester, it requires only a RaspberryPi or a BeagleBone computer for setting up the HSMM-Pi mesh-networking software, although this is one that is more for the hardcore lovers of mesh-networking and takes a little more time to setup as you need to install wireless card drivers and such.
We have to start now, and fighting against the already corrupt Internet will never work, you cannot simply re-setup the whole infrustructure of the Internet, that will take forever, this is why we need to create something new, something like, The Next Internet or as I like to say The Internet 2.0 .
== More Info ==
Maxnet Mesh - https://maxnetmesh.github.io (The Gluon-based meshnetwork in Worcester, Western Cape, South Africa .)
WorcesterMeshNet - https://wiki-biltong.rhcloud.com (The HSMM-Pi -based meshnetwork in Worcester, Western Cape, South Africa .)
Worcester Mesh Project - http://worcestermesh-project.github.io/ (All about mesh-networking, and not just in Worcester, but worldwide.)
------------
“The Internet has all the knowledge readily available for you, when you want it, but not when you need it, you do not own the servers that run the sites of knowldege.” ~Tristan B. Kildaire (Deavmi)
Hi I am Tristan B. Kildaire or also known by my online alias Deavmi, I am a Free Software (free as in “speech”, meaning that the code is open) developer at an organisation that I founded called Crowbar (https://crowbarhq.github.io), I love computer programming, it is a craft that is completely different from any other and is one that has a lot of structure and rules, which is something that I really like. I also have an interest in computer networking, although I hae no knowledge on that topic I do take quite an interest in it and would like to learn about it.
I started talking but what is my point, I haven’t even started talking about what I am here for, well here is the topic for you, “Meshnetworking in the town of Worcester and further…”, now if you do not know what I have just said in that above quotated topic let me then explain. Now being the modern age, you probably have some sort of networking in your house and probably have a wireless router (Access Point + Router), now when you connect up your laptop to this network via ethernet (a networking cable for computers) or via WLAN (wireless networking over-the-air), all of the traffic generated from your laptop, such as downloading you emails, browsing the web or chatting in some chat room like IRC or something, all the traffic is being pushed into the little box that processes all of the traffic, the router. When you recieve a WhatsApp your router had to receive it first and then pass it to your mobile device running WhatsApp, when you send a WhatsApp message your message gets sent first to your router and then to the WhatsApp servers. Now you see that is an over simplified version, there are routers ontop of routers, a whole gigantic heirachy, but say now, what if, one of those routers went down, say now it broke of was under maintenance, how do we get our traffic routed to the destination, well the sad sad answer is you don’t and that is kind of what you get for using a centralised router, anything that is centralised is not reliable as we have just seen. But Tristan, why are you making this point if surely centralisation is the only method that works. Well, no, it isn’t the only method that works, there are actually three methods, centralisation, distributed and decentralized, now the first two, “centralized” and “distributed” basically are very alike in that they can both fail you, yes, “distributed” networks can fail you less than a fully “centralised” network, but still they can both fail you, so the answer to this world-wide problem is “decentralization”, whereby each user is a client and a server of and to (respectively) the network, the both route traffic through the network and also can create traffic in the network.
Decentralization, Tristan that sounds like a really expensive and daunting task, well let’s clear that up for you, it can be really cheap, you don’t need to buy some really expensive router or anything and no it is not daunting, there are already serveral decentralized projects that exist all over the world, we have quite the choice to choose any decentralized routing protocol we want. Many devices can do mesh-routing, it is just all about the software that is currently running on them at the time, as usually the stock firmware (which is the pre-installed operating system that comes installed on a newly purchased router) has these features or lacks these features or even has these features but cannot extend much on those features, this is why we use OpenWRT (In my opinion I would prefer LibreWRT as it is comprised of 100% Free Software), as it has an amazing feature set and can install further functionality with the use of “plugins”.
Now I can also tell you something very important about why mesh-networking must exist and has existed, obviously it is to create an ad-hoc infrustructure when infrustructure is non-existent (it was initially used in the military), decentralization a.k.a mesh-networking is important for one little reason, trust.
Now setting up a meshnetwork was something that used to be very hard but several technologies such as Airmesh, Gluon, HSMM-Pi and Meshbox simplyfy the setup very easily for any end-user, which I honestly am, I might be a computer programmer but that does not mean that I have knowledge on networking, I have 0% knowlegde on that. Obviously mesh-networking is fun, so I really am endorsing you to play with all the different mesh-technologies and protocols, more than one meshnetwork will be awesome, as the more the merrier. There is a good amount of hardware available that works with Gluon, the software that is used for the Maxnet Mesh (which is a mesh-network that I started in Worcester based on the batman-adv routing protocol.) and it is an effortless process to get up and running, all is documented on the Maxnet Mesh site here, https://maxnetmesh.github.io . As for the other mesh-network I started in Worcester, it requires only a RaspberryPi or a BeagleBone computer for setting up the HSMM-Pi mesh-networking software, although this is one that is more for the hardcore lovers of mesh-networking and takes a little more time to setup as you need to install wireless card drivers and such.
We have to start now, and fighting against the already corrupt Internet will never work, you cannot simply re-setup the whole infrustructure of the Internet, that will take forever, this is why we need to create something new, something like, The Next Internet or as I like to say The Internet 2.0 .
== More Info ==
Maxnet Mesh - https://maxnetmesh.github.io (The Gluon-based meshnetwork in Worcester, Western Cape, South Africa .)
WorcesterMeshNet - https://wiki-biltong.rhcloud.com (The HSMM-Pi -based meshnetwork in Worcester, Western Cape, South Africa .)
Worcester Mesh Project - http://worcestermesh-project.github.io/ (All about mesh-networking, and not just in Worcester, but worldwide.)
