Barangay Community Wireless Network 2

With the first 4 Ubiquity wireless routers, I have tested using the Openwrt-Robin firmware for the Open-Mesh Network. The network layout is here. Sadly, there has been a lot of instability problems. One problem is the loss of connectivity to the internet from now and then even without being disconnected from the node itself.

I have tried using the Openwrt without the ROBIN or OLSR and there seems to be no problem with connectivity. I tested the r2671 ROBIN firmware and some of the lower versions but still has the same problem. I am not sure if it is Nano2 or Pico2 related, but I don't have time to delve deeper.

The reason why I was thinking of using Openwrt is for the mesh networking with an attractive Management Dashboard and the CoovaChilli for captive portal stuff for free. DD-WRT requires an additional overhead expense for the activation key for these Ubuiquity devices for which we do not have the budget. Aside from the instabilities that I have encountered, the system still would require another PC for the RADIUS and MySQL servers as I cannot afford to load all these into the 32 MB Pico2 as the gateway node.

Finally, I have decided to use the original devices' firmwares--- the AirOS. The plan is to configure a backhaul and a WDS system for the nodes onto which the clients can connect to. In between the backhaul and the WDS nodes, a pfSense box is used for many things like the Captive Portal with RADIUS Authentication, routing, bridging, DHCP and monitoring. I have used pfSense extensively in the past and it looks like it is now more stable.

I would probably be using this method until such time when more nodes are needed and probably the ROBIN firmware with Open-Mesh will be very stable by then.

With the current pace, I think the December 2009 target for deployment is still within the window frame.

Next on my agenda are: Captive Portal with RADIUS Auth and Re-Auth, and Node2 and Node3 setup and testing.