[MLB-WIRELESS] BeWiFi OSPF

[Kim Hawtin]

Hi Michael,

masked at internode.on.net wrote:
> I'm from Bendigo, VIC. and am building and deploying a WiFi
> network around the city.  I have council approval to use
> some of their rooftops and seeking permission to put up some
> towers on council land.
> 
> Until recently the deployed setup was a series of WRT54G's
> running OpenWRT Kamikaze in Ad-Hoc with OLSR.  Now after
> much testing I found this was far from ideal and have now
> opted for some ALIX boards with Senao cards in
> Infrastructure mode and currently using WDS bridges until I
> put up some 5GHz backbone antennas.
> 
> I managed to get OLSR to work with routed WDS but I have
> chosen to scrap that in favour of Quagga for many reasons
> discussed with others in experience on IRC.  Here my problem
> lies.  BGP, RIP and OSPF work nothing like OLSR and I simply
> cannot get my head around them. 

in the big scheme of things OLSR and OSPF are not that differcent.
OSPF uses multicast and OLSR uses broadcast. they both refularly annonuce
presense and chat with other rotuers regularly.

however you need to manage OSPF more. you need to structure your network more.
its not hard to do if you have a small team focused on that ;)
BGP needs more structure, IMHO., but YMMV.

you can mix OSPF and BGP on the same network, you just need to assign
point-to-point links as part of the BGP network and other other more meshy
areas as OSPF areas, where you define an area with an AS number.
eg, you have a bunch of suburbs with a mesh of OSPF connected APs/routers
and you then link them together with your BGP backbone.

you can even mix OLSR with quagga/OSPF/BGP. There is a plugin to quagga, IIRR.

> I'm wondering if someone
> can point me in the direction of some good documentation or

Quagga doco;
  http://www.quagga.net/docs.php

maybe OLSR-NG is worth a look;
  http://wiki.funkfeuer.at/index.php/OLSR-NG

more info from the LCA08 community wireless miniconf, here;
  ftp://ftp.adelaide.edu.au/pub/users/khawti01/CommunityWirelessMiniConf
unfortunately we didn't get all the material together for the day =/
but have a looksee anyways =)

i'll have a dig on the doco front, as i'm rebuilding my local setup and
deploying some more kit once the pigtails have arrived =)

> if even someone with experience would be willing to travel
> to Bendigo for a weekend and give me a hand (I'm a quick
> learner).  I would provide a place to stay, meals etc.  This
> help would be greatly appreciated.

hopefully there are some folks closer than to you than me =)

cheers,

Kim
-- 
Operating Systems, Services and Operations
Information Technology Services, The University of Adelaide
kim.hawtin at adelaide.edu.au