[B.A.T.M.A.N.] Alfred Open Beta

[B.A.T.M.A.N.] Alfred Open Beta

[Simon Wunderlich]

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To those of you who actively follow the recent discussions it may come to no
big surprise that it was decided to remove the vis functionality from the
batman-adv kernel module in a not so distant future (with the next
compatibility bump). There always has been a debate whether or not such
functionality belongs into the kernel or not. The in-kernel solution bears the
disadvantage of being rather inflexible because every change has to go through
the official Linux channels. With the growing interest in flooding the network
with arbitrary data in addition to the visualization data realizing a solution
in user-space became the obvious choice.

A new, more general user-space daemon which takes over the old vis
functionality and much more, called A.L.F.R.E.D. (Almighty Lightweight Fact
Remote Exchange Daemon) came to life. Alfred is capable of distributing
information over your mesh network in a decentralized fashion, for example
graph information for vis, but also any other data which appears to be useful
- like hostnames, phone books, administration information, DNS information,
the local weather forecast, etc while requiring (almost) zero configuration.

As the development on the core functionality has been finished and alfred works
(at least on the developers boxes), we would like to call for an open beta!
There are bleeding edge downloads and an OpenWRT feed available [1]. Please
try alfred and report bugs, send patches and inform us about your experiences.
Alfred will be release along with the next batman-adv release.

Happy routing,

The B.A.T.M.A.N. team

[1] http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/open-mesh/wiki/Alfred#Download

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Re: [B.A.T.M.A.N.] Alfred Open Beta

[Gui Iribarren]

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On 05/19/2013 07:50 AM, Simon Wunderlich wrote:
> To those of you who actively follow the recent discussions it may come to no
> big surprise that it was decided to remove the vis functionality from the
> batman-adv kernel module in a not so distant future (with the next
> compatibility bump). There always has been a debate whether or not such
> functionality belongs into the kernel or not. The in-kernel solution bears the
> disadvantage of being rather inflexible because every change has to go through
> the official Linux channels. With the growing interest in flooding the network
> with arbitrary data in addition to the visualization data realizing a solution
> in user-space became the obvious choice.
>
> A new, more general user-space daemon which takes over the old vis
> functionality and much more, called A.L.F.R.E.D. (Almighty Lightweight Fact
> Remote Exchange Daemon) came to life. Alfred is capable of distributing
> information over your mesh network in a decentralized fashion, for example
> graph information for vis, but also any other data which appears to be useful
> - like hostnames, phone books, administration information, DNS information,
> the local weather forecast, etc while requiring (almost) zero configuration.
>
> As the development on the core functionality has been finished and alfred works
> (at least on the developers boxes), we would like to call for an open beta!
> There are bleeding edge downloads and an OpenWRT feed available [1]. Please
> try alfred and report bugs, send patches and inform us about your experiences.

Cheerful Simon,
finally, i have just taken the time to test alfred, and it looks pretty 
good, binary cli is dead simple to use, thanks a lot!!

http://chef.mesh.altermundi.net/downloads/r36139/ar71xx/packages/alfred_2012.0.0-5_ar71xx.ipk

i'll take a stab at making a bat-hosts generator (are there any 
published efforts along these lines already?), but first i gave a quick 
look into current vis generator, and i observed some glitches

* where does this 00:00:00:00:00:00 mac come from?
* double interfaces don't seem to be properly detected or something

(as you can see in the attached graphs, there were also glitches in 
graphs generated by "batctl vd dot", but alfred output is even weirder)

"batctl if ; batctl o ; ip l ; vis " on each node:
karugua    http://pastebin.com/s5gF5qHA
mayuwasi   http://pastebin.com/CeKw0Rcv
lodeadrian http://pastebin.com/ne5y7P74

it's a simple 3 node setup, two of them are dualband wdr3500 (and have a 
very weak link over 5ghz) and the other one (karugua) is a single-band 
wr842nd on 2.4ghz

all of them have
alfred.alfred=alfred
alfred.alfred.interface=br-lan
alfred.alfred.mode=master
alfred.alfred.batmanif=bat0
alfred.alfred.start_vis=1

in addition, karugua is set to "batctl vm server", and with that node  i 
made the vis_batctl.svg and vis_alfred.svg graphs.

It's probably pretty trivial stuff, but i thought any feedback is better 
than no feedback! :P

Cheers!

Gui

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Re: [B.A.T.M.A.N.] Alfred Open Beta

[Simon Wunderlich]

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Hey Guido,

On Sat, Jul 20, 2013 at 12:49:37AM -0300, Gui Iribarren wrote:
> On 05/19/2013 07:50 AM, Simon Wunderlich wrote:
> >To those of you who actively follow the recent discussions it may come to no
> >big surprise that it was decided to remove the vis functionality from the
> >batman-adv kernel module in a not so distant future (with the next
> >compatibility bump). There always has been a debate whether or not such
> >functionality belongs into the kernel or not. The in-kernel solution bears the
> >disadvantage of being rather inflexible because every change has to go through
> >the official Linux channels. With the growing interest in flooding the network
> >with arbitrary data in addition to the visualization data realizing a solution
> >in user-space became the obvious choice.
> >
> >A new, more general user-space daemon which takes over the old vis
> >functionality and much more, called A.L.F.R.E.D. (Almighty Lightweight Fact
> >Remote Exchange Daemon) came to life. Alfred is capable of distributing
> >information over your mesh network in a decentralized fashion, for example
> >graph information for vis, but also any other data which appears to be useful
> >- like hostnames, phone books, administration information, DNS information,
> >the local weather forecast, etc while requiring (almost) zero configuration.
> >
> >As the development on the core functionality has been finished and alfred works
> >(at least on the developers boxes), we would like to call for an open beta!
> >There are bleeding edge downloads and an OpenWRT feed available [1]. Please
> >try alfred and report bugs, send patches and inform us about your experiences.
> 
> Cheerful Simon,
> finally, i have just taken the time to test alfred, and it looks
> pretty good, binary cli is dead simple to use, thanks a lot!!
> 
> http://chef.mesh.altermundi.net/downloads/r36139/ar71xx/packages/alfred_2012.0.0-5_ar71xx.ipk

Thanks a lot for testing and reporting back!
> 
> i'll take a stab at making a bat-hosts generator (are there any
> published efforts along these lines already?), but first i gave a
> quick look into current vis generator, and i observed some glitches
> 
> * where does this 00:00:00:00:00:00 mac come from?
> * double interfaces don't seem to be properly detected or something
> 

Yeah, that is indeed a glitch. There was a bug that only the first interface
MAC was filled correctly, and other interfaces were just reported as
00:00:00:00:00:00. This should be fixed upstream and in the openwrt package
(release 6), please give it a try!

The double interfaces issue should be fixed with that too, I hope. :)

Cheers,
	Simon

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