[Freedombox-discuss] Which mesh system should be included in the Freedombox?

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

[Sandy Harris]
> As I see it, security has to be the first consideration for any Box
> component, including a mesh system. Given the stated project goals we
> should not even consider anything unless we have good reason to
> consider it secure.

Well, I believe that is putting the cart in front of the horse, given
the current amount of people involved.  I believe we first need to get
something useful that can be located in the privacy of the users homes
to get that legal protection, and then we can continue improving that to
make it more and more "secure", which is a word that mean different
things to different people and thus hard to have as a fuzzy goal.

This mean to me that we pick solutions already in common use and
integrate it into the Freedombox, and depend on the rest of the free
software community to audit it (with our help, if someone in the
Freedombox want to spend time on it).

> If something looks desirable but has not had an audit for security,
> then auditing it and contributing fixes if needed is more important
> for the Box than things like getting it into Debian or making it run
> on a Dreamplug.

I am happy to hear that you want to focus on that area, and suggest you
have a look at the batman-adv mesh routing system when you find time to
audit mesh systems.

I've concluded I will focus on batman-adv for now, as it provide layer 2
mesh networking (as in both IPv4 and IPv6 will work) and is used by the
Serval project that provide a peer-to-peer phone system that allow phone
calls and "SMS" messaging without central infrastucture.  If the
freedombox provide mesh nodes compatible with the Serval project, we get
free software phone support for free. :)

See my blog post from yesterday,
<URL:http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Oslo_community_mesh_network___with_NUUG_and_Hackeriet_at_Hausmania.html>,
for more details of what I have found out so far.

-- 
Happy hacking
Petter Reinholdtsen