WirelessAfrica - User contributions [en]

Mpumulanga Mesh

2006-01-04T16:34:04Z

Kilos: /* Location */

== Location ==

White River is a medium sized town about 20 minutes north of Nelspruit, the capital of Mpumalanga Province. Peables Valley and the Masoi Tribal land is located 20 minutes to the North East of White River along the road leading to the Kruger National Parks Numbi gate.

The area is hilly with some large granite outcrops. The Peables Valley stretches from the ACTS clinic and divides the commercial farms from the Masoi area. Commercial farming in the broader area is predominately timber but fortunately along the valley there is no timber farming (this would pose a connectivity problem and impact line of sight requirements). The farmers as a community are already well connected (organisationally not in terms of Internet connectivity) with commando like structures in place because of crime.

The ACTS clinic is located at the beginning of the Valley. ACTS stands for AIDS Care Training and Support Clinic. They provide medical services to AIDS patients, councilling, testing and Anti-retroviral (ARV) treatment. The clinic has gained a reputation within the community with many people coming from outside of the Masoyi area for treatment. They are have been selected for managing ARV roleout because of their well developed councilling, testing and support group networks. Currently they have about 200 people on ARVs with this figure likely to grow to over 600. These treatements are being monitored by researchers at WITS University.

The Masoyi area runs along the right hand side of the valley. We identified approximately 10 schools, with two identified as being high schools with computer facilities. The project team has good links to a teacher in one of these schools who is in charge of the computer lab. In the area there is also a teachers training centre, government hospital and various government clinics in the area. The ACTS clinic runs a hospice close to one of the Government clinics.

== Situation in the Community ==

The community is underserviced. Most roads remain unpaved with the main road having been rebuilt after the floods of 2000. Electricity is available within the community.
The community is poor and has been hugely impacted by AIDS. Losing salaried member of households through AIDS has a big impact on extended families. There is also the associated superstition and secretiveness around AIDS which does not help improve the situation.

== ACTS clinic ==

The clinic is a non-profit organisation established to provide AIDS care in the Masoyi area. It was initially sponsored by Glaxo Smithcline. The clinic has two doctors, an onsite hospice, training centre and accomodation for people on training courses.

A number of staff have been trained to provide pre-test and post-test councilling. This leaves the doctors free to focus on the medical aspects of treatment. The clinic operates in many ways like a private doctors practice. They charge consultation fees and patients on medical aid are charged accordingly. They however usually waive all fees as soon as it is established that a patient is suffering from AIDS. The clinic is relatively sopphisticated in their use of computers: they run practice management software, are connected to the Internet via Vsat for their research with WITS. They also have some custom MS Access based applications written internally to track patient statistics.

== Proposed Solution ==

Deploy a mesh network within the Peables Valley, run training courses to transfer skills on mesh setup and installation, work together with the clinic staff using Free Attitude Interviews (FAI) to discover applications and uses that work for the staff.

== What problem is being addressed ==

The main thrust is to connect the clinic to its community hospice and thus allow them to extend their computer facilities to the hospice (practise management software and statistics gathering). This is most easily achieved through a wireless network and more specifically a mesh because of the terrain.

A mesh network requires a number of nodes in areas not owned by the clinic but that are part of the commuity: schools and farmers. The main thrust of the research question is to implement the network in such a way that the firstly the clinic and secondly the community have taken ownership of the network. That they have created systems that ensure that the infrastructure is maintained and expanded by the users of the network.

== Technology Explained ==

A wireless network involves radios and aerials. The radios broadcast and receive signals which are boosted and directed by the arials. Anyone with a radio can access the network. The spectrum used for Wifi required line-of-sight for connectivity. The routes between sites are also hard coded or manually adjusted in each device. This makes it technically difficult on two levels. Firstly, you need a deaper understanding or the radio spectrum and the operation of radio wave and secondly, configuration of the equipment requires a higher level of skill.

A mesh network uses the same infrastructure: aerials and radios. But at the network level it operated differently. The network simply requires that each node can see at least one other node (ie it can be part of the network) and that each node can send traffic to any node on the network (ie there are no islands which are not connected to the whole). In a mesh network this problem is solved at the software level. As long as your node can see another node it will be able to determine the routes to follow. The also allows for a level of self healing and thus less maintenance. If for example a truck parks in from of the node or a tree grows up over time and block the signal to another node then as long as the node can see an alternate node it can route traffic via this new path. On a conventional wireless network this would need to be manually configured.

The choice of mesh in the Peables Valley was made for these reasons:
Hilly terrain that requires a number of hops to reach the destination
Low skilled network operators
Changing conditions in the environment. Nodes that disappear through neglect, theft, obstruction.

== Social Challenges ==

There are a number of social challenges:

Firstly, for the the network to operate to serivice firstly the clinic and secondly the community it requires the cooperations of teachers in schools and of farmers. They all have there own agenda's there own perceptions of their expected level of involvment and their expectation of how aid is given to them.

In the school we are concerned about a hand-out mentality that will not see the school working hard to be involved in the extension of the mesh but simply being involved as long as it takes to link the school to the Internet. There is also the risk of our contact at the school wanting to be seen as being in charge and not wanting to work together with schools in the community.

To addess that we are looking at bringing the school pupils into the process from the beginning and teaching them how to install and configure equipment.

Secondly, with the farmers we are confident that it will be easy to sell them the concept of Internet connectivity. However, for the network to work for them will require that they connect to schools in the Masoyi area. We are not certain about the realtionship between these two groups. Considering the crime levels there is the risk that there is not a good level of trust.

Our strategy is to involve people from both groups during training workshops. Which at the very least would allow realtionships to be established.

Lastly, this is not the primary focus of the ACTS clinic so there will always be the risk that people are redeployed.

However, our main contact in the clinic is an electrical engineer by profession and the clinic itself has proved that they are a teaching organisation (their previous garder now runs the reception).

== Technical Challenges ==

Mesh networks are a new phenomena with the software sometimes not yet at the level required for the mesh to operate well. There is the risk that in this project we will discover the limitations of the technology and have to spend time compensating for that.

Some of the endpoint nodes we have identified require many hops. This requires many nodes. This is both a social and technical challenge. Social in that the project needs to bring each of those players on board and technical in that each of those nodes needs to be built, deployed and maintained.

There is also the risk of theft. The node equipment has very little commercial resale value in the community, although there seems to be wifi operating in the Nelspruit, White River area. However, that never seems to be a consideration of petty thieves. Hopefully deploying the equipment in established locations: schools, shops, private homes and not simply in the open will help secure the equipment.

== Equipment Ownership ==

As the objective is to create a community based network where the network is seen as a community asset so therefore some of the equipment at key nodes should belong to the community. Official ownership will be with the ACTS clinic until such time as a more formal structure for ownership of key mesh equipment can be established.

As the mesh grows individual node owners will own their own equipment. So a farmer or school will be the owner of that equipment and it will form part of the mesh. It is hoped that farmers will partner with institutions such as schools in which case the partners will define ownership relationships.

The project does not envision supplying any equipment to farmers unless they are located such that having equipment on their farm is critical to creating the mesh. In such as case we would look at funding that node if the project has to but the project will still attempt to have the farmer install his/her own equipment.

== Intellectual Property ==

The project will release all work under a suitable Open Source license. This work includes documentation and results of the research.

The project will not be developing any independent software but will be using other freely available mesh software. In the case that software is improved or modified it will be released under the license of the original software project to ensure that it can be included in future releases of that software.

== Sustainability ==

A key component to sustainability will be involvement of the farmers, Bible colleges, etc within the Peables Valley. The project will draw in the farmers for the following reasons: 1) they are a source of skills, 2) they have finances to pay for Internet connectivity and 3) that once they become users they are likely to become dependent on the mesh and thus ensure its ongoing success.

Part of the program will be to educate participants from the start so that they can extend the reach of the mesh. Included will be education of pupils from the partner schools. This education is designed to ensure that enough skills are available in the valley to repair nodes, setup new nodes, manage the mesh and train others.

A key component to the sustainability is that the project manager as the ACTS clinic is a qualified electrical engineer. We are therefore confident that it will not be difficult to educate him on the workings of the mesh network. He has already demonstrated his excitement and commitment to the project by spending a Saturday with the project leaders evaluating high sites. He is involved in training staff and is extremely practical so will be invaluable in erecting high sites.

== Pros and Cons of the system ==

First considering some positive aspects of the mesh. Firstly the clinic is already using IT infrastructure in the following areas: ARV monitoring, clinic management and accounts. Farmer, bible colleges, etc in the community already use the Internet for email etc but usually at great cost because of the limited choice of commectivity options. The partner schools already has a lab that has in the past been connected to the Internet. So there is already a body of people who have demonstrated the willingness or need to use the Internet who we feel would be willing the use a mesh if it provide always on and lower Internet connectivity costs.

The potential problems we see are the following. There is the risk that the effort to manage or be part of the mesh may be more expensive then direct connection especially in the case of the lack of good neighbourliness from any mesh participant. The clinic, although they currently use IT extensively, may in fact not need to extend that usage beyond the main clinic. The risk with the schools we feel is that there is a general hand-out mentality and that there will not be the will to learn, extend the network or integrate this into the curriculum. Another large risk is the sustainability of the network not from the mesh side but from the side of financing the hop onto the Internet itself.

== Backhaul Connectivity ==

The connectivity to ACTS is provided via Telkom VSAT. ACTS uses the connection as part of their involvement in ARV roleout for the Right To Care group. They have an Internet based application for capturing details of patients for monitoring and evaluating patients receiving ARVs

== Network Topology ==

[[Image:Acts meshnet.jpg]]

== News Flashes ==

== September 22, 2005, WiFi in the bush or the plot ==

Duane visited the IDRC funded workshop for WiFi in Africa. Sorry don't know what the real project name is. Sat in on the session on regulation, the Department of Communications delegates decided that this would be a good time to leave. Nice when you know you can't actually stand the heat.

Had a look at their cantenna based access-point liming over about 5km. With a Linksys strapped to a tree with... red tape... man we can't get away from red tape in this industry.

Most surprising was plot.net a local WISP that delivers Internet to about 100 customers and nobody new that they existed before booking the venue. They do long haul links to ADSL connections in Pretoria. Quite an innovative solution to high cost access. I want to explore that possibility in Peebles Valley.

== October 06, 2005 Wikipedia on the mesh ==

David and I visited the Peebles Mesh this week for two days and here is
a quick synopsis of events:

- We installed a firewall. This has software which should allow us to
control and cap bandwidth and it separates us from the clinic.
- We installed a local copy of Wikipedia. Still some bugs but very fast
- We can now access the site remotely

Big SURPRISE

Our cantennae was still operating! We did a data transfer from the
wireless box to ourselves. 3 hops I think at 192kB/s

First farmer online

We connected the chairman of the local farmers group to the Internet.
It was lovely we just watched and took notes. The farmers younger
brother had returned from the UK with a new laptop. We got that
connected. The first thing he asked is if he could download music - ho
hum :)

The sister of the farmer was also visiting and started giving her mother
a sales pitch about how they could talk to each other using skype for
free.

Was lovely to watch and we had boere kos but arrived a bit late for
lunch. We will ensure that doesn't happen again.

== July 06, 2005, Realisation of a mesh vision ==

Today we had a film crew filming the installation of a mesh node. It was great fun but they did waste our time a bit. Technically this is what we got done:

* Installed the node on Agnus' house permanently. Lassy did all this work
* Put a 3m pole at the Hospice to see if we can get over the ridge
* Upgraded AGNUS, HOSPICE and SIKILE to OpenWrt
* The clinic is cabled to various buildings so we will be able to recover one node and just run a cable from the FLATS node to the VSAT.

We had a 7ms delay between AGNUS and ACTS_VSAT which is a route that passes through all present nodes. VoIP is now truely achievable. Wonderful performance compared to WDS mode. Throw out WDS wherever you see it its just not worth the effort. It is honestly more simple to setup OLSR. Glad we've learnt that and can move on.

We still have the following technical hurdles to overcome. The default route keeps disappearing. We need to install a proper firewall. Once that is done we can move onto the community adoption.

The day was full of some lovely experiences of the potential of what we are doing.

Once we had AGNUS up we setup Dave's laptop and had Agnus' daughter and a neighbour sit at the computer. Dave opened Google. They didn't know what to do. We asked them what information they wanted to know. Stuck again. "Who is your favourite singer?" - Alicia Keys - "OK type that in the search box, then click on search" - Shouts of glee as the search results return. "Now click here". Off they went to Alecia Keys home site and disappeared for about 10 minutes. Does that count as training? The two of them were sitting inside quite a dark house, they sat together on a sofa and the laptop screen glowed in the semi-dark with their face highlighted. This exact image was the vision I had for this project. So that made my day.

I did a quick training course in the dirt. Explaining what the different aerials did, how it all fitted together. And of course how to use a high-gain antenna as a fish braai. Lassy provided Swati translation as soon as there was any confusion.

Now off to the school to film students working on computers. They wanted to interview the teacher, who was a standing in for Mr Sihlabela who we usualy work with. "What will you use the Internet for at your school", to which he replied, "I don't know". David did a quick exercise of taking the teacher, a history teacher, to Google. They Googled for "Shaka Zulu" and ended up at a very good site on the subject. "What will you use the Internet for at your school", and we got a 5 minute reply. Does that count as training?

What worked best about this trip was having a very focused objective - get the mesh network working. We didn't care about the firewall, the billing, shapping, etc. And we got it done. The next trips will be similarly technically focussed.

== July 05,2005 Moving on to OLSR ==

I left Peebles Valley at the end of May and this is the first return since then. David and I are migrating all the Linksys boxes from Sveasoft to OpenWrt, specifically the builds produced by Freifunk which has a nice web interface. Lassy has joined us again and is helping us move the equipment around.

The task involves loading the Freifunk firmware onto the box. This requires local connectivity. We still had connection problem until we discovered the ghosts of a WDS past. Alot of WDS settings were still on each of the boxes. We've now had to go and remove those especially the Lazy WDS mode settings which keep establishing bridges. OLSR looks like the right solution. Its the same amount of work as WDS setup but you get real routes, ones that you see and can traceroute through so you can actually see exactly how packets are being routed on the network. I'm much much happier. Yesterday we got USAID, ACTS_VSAT and ACTS_FLATS converted. Today we are in the field with a film crew and will migrate: AGNUS house, SIKILE_HIGH and FARM_COBUS. If we can get traffic from either Agnus' house or Cobus' farm then we know that the protocol is good, both these points would have to route through. SIKILE, USAID, ACTS_FLATS then ACTS_VSAT. WDS could never do that and if we can get this working then the mesh is good and we can move onto the next challenging problem.

At the last conservancy meeting at which ACTS clinic was present they mentioned the Mesh but all the farmers were wondering when exactly anything would happen. Hopefully we have a working system before we leave.

We also spoke to Frans Benz whose property is below USAID and he is still interested.

Of the nodes that we have observed all were powered up except ACTS_VSAT this was good as it means that people are leaving the equipment to do its job. THe VSAT was down because the plug is just too close to a useful double adapter.

We have brought 300m of CAT5 cable which the clinic will use to run cable from the VSat to the Flat so we can eliminate one node and use it elsewhere. This clinic has arranged conduit and pulling of the cables.

== February 19, 2005, Lessons learned from week long meshing ==

Lessons learnt

* Test test test: test devices in a known controlled environment. The box couldn't connect and we weren't sure exactly why.
* Use your own stuff: don't use other peoples stuff. We tried to use the alarm companies mast, it was rubbish and about to fall down. But it could also endanger our equipment when the alarm company removes there antennae.
* Equipment: cover for your laptop so you can see the screen. Backpack/fishing jacket also a head- mounted display wouldn't hurt (to monitor the wireless network). Rifle-mounted antennae with sight. Tri-pod for temporary mounting of equipment. Ladders are a problem you need a long extension ladder about 6m.
* Windows Sucks: we had major packet drop yet on Linux the network pings work perfectly. Either Windows has a simple and incompetant network layer or it puts so much rubbish on the network that it sucks up all bandwidth. Why do people use this rubbish!
* Testing protocol: It would be usefull to have a set standard of how you tackle problem. Many time you go down the wrong route. Simple idea: mount antennae with laptop and get signal strengths right. Then connect box browse to the box over the wire and check for links. Lastly connect to the box as a wireless client.

Observations on the first stage

The object of this exercise was for David and I to learn how to setup the equipment before involving the community. This objective has been met: the mesh functions well, we can monitor it and we can use it from any node.
Successes

We created a 4 node mesh that works and can connect to the Internet. Although we had issues these were just teething problem for the technicians and the hardware is really box-drop ready. This is really positive for a non-technical mesh community.

We met with the farmers and they now know what we are doing which give us easier access to their properties. The USAid couple were very helpful, very keen and are well known and liked in the community. We hope that this relationship and them being early users will help increase adoption within the farming community.

We validated that we can connect to the school through the USAid node. Although our contact at the school was on sick leave the principle made arrangements for another teacher to stay after school on Friday for almost 4 hours while we attempted to setup their node. We also noted the school now has a 15 seat computer lab.

The ACTS clinic staff were quite excited especially those that are volunteers from overseas. A number of ideas for the use of the network were put forward by the staff. These included using house bound AIDS patients to data capture for the clinic or simply to create new virtual relationships. Also suggested was using instant messaging as a form of anonymous counciling to allow school pupils to speak openly about AIDS.
Issues noted

Support! We have already got our first support call from people who use operating system that know better then you what they want to do. This is a source of potential problems as people will phone the clinic and overbuden an already busy staff. We need to investigate how the community can provide that support or busget to pay for such support.

Lightning! This is going to be a serious problem, there are solutions such as mast spikes that we need to install.

Power downs. The clinic powers off most of their equipment at night thus taking the gateway down. We need to look at way to keep this up. The conection also require human intervention and we need to investigate automation of this taks.

Network separation. The mesh is currently on the clinic network. The clinic does deal with sensitive data but also for security and management issues we need to seperate the neworks from each other.

Usage monitoring, charging. We need to begin monitoring and controlling usage so that we can explore charging models in the future.

Windows... it puts junk on the network. We need to look at simple firewall rules on the nodes to drop NetBEUI junk from the network.
Next steps

We will return to the site in a months time. At this time we wish to: separate the networks, install the school node, install a monitoring and access control system and announce a training course for the following month.

We will separate the networks by installing a new network card on the firewall. Most probably we will use NoCatAuth to control access to the network but need to investigate alternatives.

Other things to investigate are models for charging for network usage. Currently our strategy is to have farmers cross-subsidise the schools connectivity. A problem with this however is that other forms of connectivity are becoming relatively cheap (3G, etc) so this still needs to be reasonable.

== February 19, 2005, Too much sun for a geek ==

Day 4: Had steak at the conservancy meeting. Talked a little about the mesh - nobody understood what I was tgalking about... But getting cheap Internet sounded cool to them. The farmers have serious problem with Telk^h^h^h^h connectivity, phones, lightning, macadamia thieves, water, etc.

Day 5: Dave J works for a big parastatal like company which means he always comes late cause someone wants him to do something (he tells me he was fighting Jhb traffic to get more Linksys boxes. Mainly spent the morning getting ntop (a great network monitoring tool working) and got EtherApe (nice graphical monitoring tool) working. These are quite good for seeing how badly Windows abuses network resources.

Spent the afternoon with David at Sikhile High. Was pretty fruitless we couldn't work out if it was the box, antennae, or sun that was messing us around.

Day 6: Installed the USAid node properly. Took a long time and got really sunburned. Note to self need a ladder, suntan lotion, umbrella and LOTS of water. Installed a 90deg patch panel. We had major problems getting links to the clinic which was frustrating.

== February 17, 2005, More meshing ==

Day 3 cont...: Got USAid online, had been switched off not blown up by lightning. Phew. Installed a second mesh point which proved not to be needed. Worked out how to add parameters to the Kismet display, only worked out later that the signal strength bar graph is completely arbitrary. Will need to check all that again today. Installed an AP on the accomodation block, this seems a waste and we will probnably run cable from an AP installed on the staff flats instead.

Day 4: David J should be joining me today and we will be meeting with the farmers in the conservancy for a braai. I hope that we can raise the issue of what we are building and get people excited. Just before leaving yesterday I got everything up: I can ping all the other APs and can get out onto the net. I'll be checking this again remotely to see if I can get from USAid, to the clinic and out.

== February 16, 2005, Meshing ==

I've had a busy few days here in Peables Valley:

Day 1: Setup a linksys on the roof of the clinic. Found that we really can't see Petra from here or anywhere actually, Petra is a nice high point but all buildings are hidden behind a large rock. We installed one at a house belonging to consultants for USAid. This is a good site as we can see the staff flats from there but none of the other buildings. The problem with this is we now need to find a good spot at the clinic so that we can see USAid without using two APs at the clinic.

I visited the school, unfortunately Mr Sihlabela is off ill until March. I met with the principal and two other teachers and have agreed to visit on Friday with David. The school can see USAid but we still need to confirm the signal strength.

In discussions with various people I realised that lightning is going to be a serious problem. With all the equipment on an AP costing about R2,000 it can cripple a network if they have a serious strike.

Day 2: A frustrating day trying to get Kismet working. This involved creating a patched kernel to allow the orinoco driver to go into Monitor mode. Finding, downloading and compiling takes a long time. I did manage to get onto the clinic roof and confirm that we couldn't see a signal from USAid. We did get a signal from the staff flats.

In discussing uses for the network we had some new ideas:

* Getting house ridden patients a computer to get them communicating and getting outside virtually.
* Having the same patient do data capturing to bolster his income
* We also talked about using SMS and cellphones for compliance. Setting alarms for medicine taking. SMS messages that require a reply to check compliance. Notifying support group buddies about people not replying to SMS notification so that they can check that they're OK.

Day 3: Kismet is working! Not all the information is that useful for what I need to do. Met the clinic staff today to try and explain what we're doing. Today I'm checking signal strength from the school, its seems however that USAid is offline.

== February 11, 2005, Equipment got ==

We now have the equipment for the FMFI Wireless project in Mpumalanga. We have 10 Linksys wireless AP which we're firmware upgrading. The cards are in a nice heavy duty all weather box. A picture would be great :). All the boxes are being moded to do power over ethernet which makes hte whole installation clean and simple. Currently it looks like costs are around R2,000 a node.

I'm lugging the lot down to White River this weekend and will erect 3 of the nodes. Mainly to test equipment and get a working initial network. The other nodes will be setup by the community, following the Onno Purbo style of network deployment.

Mpumulanga Mesh

2006-01-04T16:30:19Z

Kilos: /* Situation in the Community */

Mpumulanga Mesh

2006-01-04T16:28:48Z

Kilos: /* Technology Explained */

== Location ==

White River is a medium sized town about 20 minutes north of Nelspruit, the capital of Mpumalanga Province. Peables Valley and the Masoi Tribal land is located 20 minutes to the North East of White River along the road leading to the Kruger National Parks Numbi gate.

The area is hilly with some large granite outcrops. The Peables Valley stretches from the ACTS clinic and divides the commercial farms from the Masoi area. Commercial farming in the broader area is predominately timber but fortunately along the valley there is no timber farming (this would pose a connectivity problem and impact line of sight requirements). The farmers as a community are already well connected (organisationally not in terms of Internet connectivity) with commando like structures in place because of crime.

The ACTS clinic is located at the beginning of the Valley. ACTS stands for AIDS Care Training and Support Clinic. They provide medical services to AIDS patients, councilling, testing and Anti-retroviral (ARV) treatment. The clinic has gained a reputation within the community with many people coming from outside of the Masoyi area for treatment. They are have been selected for managing ARV roleout because of their well developed councilling, testing and support group networks. Currently they have about 200 people on ARVs with this figure likely to grow to over 600. These treatements are being monitored by researchers at WITS University.

The Masoyi area runs along the right hand side of the valley. We identified approximately 10 schools, with two identified as being high schools with computer facilities. The project team has good links to a teacher in one of these schools who is in charge of the computer lab. In the area there is also a teachers training centre, government hospital and various government clinics in the area. The ACTS clinic runs a hospice close to one of the Government clinics.

== Situation in the Community ==

The community is underserviced. Most roads remain unpaved with the main road having been rebuilt after the floods of 2000. Electricity is available within the community.
The community is poor and has been hugely impacted by AIDS. Losing salaried member of households through AIDS has a bi impact on extended families. There is also the associated superstition and secretiveness around AIDS which does not help improve the situation.

== ACTS clinic ==

The clinic is a non-profit organisation established to provide AIDS care in the Masoyi area. It was initially sponsored by Glaxo Smithcline. The clinic has two doctors, an onsite hospice, training centre and accomodation for people on training courses.

A number of staff have been trained to provide pre-test and post-test councilling. This leaves the doctors free to focus on the medical aspects of treatment. The clinic operates in many ways like a private doctors practice. They charge consultation fees and patients on medical aid are charged accordingly. They however usually waive all fees as soon as it is established that a patient is suffering from AIDS. The clinic is relatively sopphisticated in their use of computers: they run practice management software, are connected to the Internet via Vsat for their research with WITS. They also have some custom MS Access based applications written internally to track patient statistics.

== Proposed Solution ==

Deploy a mesh network within the Peables Valley, run training courses to transfer skills on mesh setup and installation, work together with the clinic staff using Free Attitude Interviews (FAI) to discover applications and uses that work for the staff.

== What problem is being addressed ==

The main thrust is to connect the clinic to its community hospice and thus allow them to extend their computer facilities to the hospice (practise management software and statistics gathering). This is most easily achieved through a wireless network and more specifically a mesh because of the terrain.

A mesh network requires a number of nodes in areas not owned by the clinic but that are part of the commuity: schools and farmers. The main thrust of the research question is to implement the network in such a way that the firstly the clinic and secondly the community have taken ownership of the network. That they have created systems that ensure that the infrastructure is maintained and expanded by the users of the network.

== Technology Explained ==

A wireless network involves radios and aerials. The radios broadcast and receive signals which are boosted and directed by the arials. Anyone with a radio can access the network. The spectrum used for Wifi required line-of-sight for connectivity. The routes between sites are also hard coded or manually adjusted in each device. This makes it technically difficult on two levels. Firstly, you need a deaper understanding or the radio spectrum and the operation of radio wave and secondly, configuration of the equipment requires a higher level of skill.

A mesh network uses the same infrastructure: aerials and radios. But at the network level it operated differently. The network simply requires that each node can see at least one other node (ie it can be part of the network) and that each node can send traffic to any node on the network (ie there are no islands which are not connected to the whole). In a mesh network this problem is solved at the software level. As long as your node can see another node it will be able to determine the routes to follow. The also allows for a level of self healing and thus less maintenance. If for example a truck parks in from of the node or a tree grows up over time and block the signal to another node then as long as the node can see an alternate node it can route traffic via this new path. On a conventional wireless network this would need to be manually configured.

The choice of mesh in the Peables Valley was made for these reasons:
Hilly terrain that requires a number of hops to reach the destination
Low skilled network operators
Changing conditions in the environment. Nodes that disappear through neglect, theft, obstruction.

== Social Challenges ==

There are a number of social challenges:

Firstly, for the the network to operate to serivice firstly the clinic and secondly the community it requires the cooperations of teachers in schools and of farmers. They all have there own agenda's there own perceptions of their expected level of involvment and their expectation of how aid is given to them.

In the school we are concerned about a hand-out mentality that will not see the school working hard to be involved in the extension of the mesh but simply being involved as long as it takes to link the school to the Internet. There is also the risk of our contact at the school wanting to be seen as being in charge and not wanting to work together with schools in the community.

To addess that we are looking at bringing the school pupils into the process from the beginning and teaching them how to install and configure equipment.

Secondly, with the farmers we are confident that it will be easy to sell them the concept of Internet connectivity. However, for the network to work for them will require that they connect to schools in the Masoyi area. We are not certain about the realtionship between these two groups. Considering the crime levels there is the risk that there is not a good level of trust.

Our strategy is to involve people from both groups during training workshops. Which at the very least would allow realtionships to be established.

Lastly, this is not the primary focus of the ACTS clinic so there will always be the risk that people are redeployed.

However, our main contact in the clinic is an electrical engineer by profession and the clinic itself has proved that they are a teaching organisation (their previous garder now runs the reception).

== Technical Challenges ==

Mesh networks are a new phenomena with the software sometimes not yet at the level required for the mesh to operate well. There is the risk that in this project we will discover the limitations of the technology and have to spend time compensating for that.

Some of the endpoint nodes we have identified require many hops. This requires many nodes. This is both a social and technical challenge. Social in that the project needs to bring each of those players on board and technical in that each of those nodes needs to be built, deployed and maintained.

There is also the risk of theft. The node equipment has very little commercial resale value in the community, although there seems to be wifi operating in the Nelspruit, White River area. However, that never seems to be a consideration of petty thieves. Hopefully deploying the equipment in established locations: schools, shops, private homes and not simply in the open will help secure the equipment.

== Equipment Ownership ==

As the objective is to create a community based network where the network is seen as a community asset so therefore some of the equipment at key nodes should belong to the community. Official ownership will be with the ACTS clinic until such time as a more formal structure for ownership of key mesh equipment can be established.

As the mesh grows individual node owners will own their own equipment. So a farmer or school will be the owner of that equipment and it will form part of the mesh. It is hoped that farmers will partner with institutions such as schools in which case the partners will define ownership relationships.

The project does not envision supplying any equipment to farmers unless they are located such that having equipment on their farm is critical to creating the mesh. In such as case we would look at funding that node if the project has to but the project will still attempt to have the farmer install his/her own equipment.

== Intellectual Property ==

The project will release all work under a suitable Open Source license. This work includes documentation and results of the research.

The project will not be developing any independent software but will be using other freely available mesh software. In the case that software is improved or modified it will be released under the license of the original software project to ensure that it can be included in future releases of that software.

== Sustainability ==

A key component to sustainability will be involvement of the farmers, Bible colleges, etc within the Peables Valley. The project will draw in the farmers for the following reasons: 1) they are a source of skills, 2) they have finances to pay for Internet connectivity and 3) that once they become users they are likely to become dependent on the mesh and thus ensure its ongoing success.

Part of the program will be to educate participants from the start so that they can extend the reach of the mesh. Included will be education of pupils from the partner schools. This education is designed to ensure that enough skills are available in the valley to repair nodes, setup new nodes, manage the mesh and train others.

A key component to the sustainability is that the project manager as the ACTS clinic is a qualified electrical engineer. We are therefore confident that it will not be difficult to educate him on the workings of the mesh network. He has already demonstrated his excitement and commitment to the project by spending a Saturday with the project leaders evaluating high sites. He is involved in training staff and is extremely practical so will be invaluable in erecting high sites.

== Pros and Cons of the system ==

First considering some positive aspects of the mesh. Firstly the clinic is already using IT infrastructure in the following areas: ARV monitoring, clinic management and accounts. Farmer, bible colleges, etc in the community already use the Internet for email etc but usually at great cost because of the limited choice of commectivity options. The partner schools already has a lab that has in the past been connected to the Internet. So there is already a body of people who have demonstrated the willingness or need to use the Internet who we feel would be willing the use a mesh if it provide always on and lower Internet connectivity costs.

The potential problems we see are the following. There is the risk that the effort to manage or be part of the mesh may be more expensive then direct connection especially in the case of the lack of good neighbourliness from any mesh participant. The clinic, although they currently use IT extensively, may in fact not need to extend that usage beyond the main clinic. The risk with the schools we feel is that there is a general hand-out mentality and that there will not be the will to learn, extend the network or integrate this into the curriculum. Another large risk is the sustainability of the network not from the mesh side but from the side of financing the hop onto the Internet itself.

== Backhaul Connectivity ==

The connectivity to ACTS is provided via Telkom VSAT. ACTS uses the connection as part of their involvement in ARV roleout for the Right To Care group. They have an Internet based application for capturing details of patients for monitoring and evaluating patients receiving ARVs

== Network Topology ==

[[Image:Acts meshnet.jpg]]

== News Flashes ==

== September 22, 2005, WiFi in the bush or the plot ==

Duane visited the IDRC funded workshop for WiFi in Africa. Sorry don't know what the real project name is. Sat in on the session on regulation, the Department of Communications delegates decided that this would be a good time to leave. Nice when you know you can't actually stand the heat.

Had a look at their cantenna based access-point liming over about 5km. With a Linksys strapped to a tree with... red tape... man we can't get away from red tape in this industry.

Most surprising was plot.net a local WISP that delivers Internet to about 100 customers and nobody new that they existed before booking the venue. They do long haul links to ADSL connections in Pretoria. Quite an innovative solution to high cost access. I want to explore that possibility in Peebles Valley.

== October 06, 2005 Wikipedia on the mesh ==

David and I visited the Peebles Mesh this week for two days and here is
a quick synopsis of events:

- We installed a firewall. This has software which should allow us to
control and cap bandwidth and it separates us from the clinic.
- We installed a local copy of Wikipedia. Still some bugs but very fast
- We can now access the site remotely

Big SURPRISE

Our cantennae was still operating! We did a data transfer from the
wireless box to ourselves. 3 hops I think at 192kB/s

First farmer online

We connected the chairman of the local farmers group to the Internet.
It was lovely we just watched and took notes. The farmers younger
brother had returned from the UK with a new laptop. We got that
connected. The first thing he asked is if he could download music - ho
hum :)

The sister of the farmer was also visiting and started giving her mother
a sales pitch about how they could talk to each other using skype for
free.

Was lovely to watch and we had boere kos but arrived a bit late for
lunch. We will ensure that doesn't happen again.

== July 06, 2005, Realisation of a mesh vision ==

Today we had a film crew filming the installation of a mesh node. It was great fun but they did waste our time a bit. Technically this is what we got done:

* Installed the node on Agnus' house permanently. Lassy did all this work
* Put a 3m pole at the Hospice to see if we can get over the ridge
* Upgraded AGNUS, HOSPICE and SIKILE to OpenWrt
* The clinic is cabled to various buildings so we will be able to recover one node and just run a cable from the FLATS node to the VSAT.

We had a 7ms delay between AGNUS and ACTS_VSAT which is a route that passes through all present nodes. VoIP is now truely achievable. Wonderful performance compared to WDS mode. Throw out WDS wherever you see it its just not worth the effort. It is honestly more simple to setup OLSR. Glad we've learnt that and can move on.

We still have the following technical hurdles to overcome. The default route keeps disappearing. We need to install a proper firewall. Once that is done we can move onto the community adoption.

The day was full of some lovely experiences of the potential of what we are doing.

Once we had AGNUS up we setup Dave's laptop and had Agnus' daughter and a neighbour sit at the computer. Dave opened Google. They didn't know what to do. We asked them what information they wanted to know. Stuck again. "Who is your favourite singer?" - Alicia Keys - "OK type that in the search box, then click on search" - Shouts of glee as the search results return. "Now click here". Off they went to Alecia Keys home site and disappeared for about 10 minutes. Does that count as training? The two of them were sitting inside quite a dark house, they sat together on a sofa and the laptop screen glowed in the semi-dark with their face highlighted. This exact image was the vision I had for this project. So that made my day.

I did a quick training course in the dirt. Explaining what the different aerials did, how it all fitted together. And of course how to use a high-gain antenna as a fish braai. Lassy provided Swati translation as soon as there was any confusion.

Now off to the school to film students working on computers. They wanted to interview the teacher, who was a standing in for Mr Sihlabela who we usualy work with. "What will you use the Internet for at your school", to which he replied, "I don't know". David did a quick exercise of taking the teacher, a history teacher, to Google. They Googled for "Shaka Zulu" and ended up at a very good site on the subject. "What will you use the Internet for at your school", and we got a 5 minute reply. Does that count as training?

What worked best about this trip was having a very focused objective - get the mesh network working. We didn't care about the firewall, the billing, shapping, etc. And we got it done. The next trips will be similarly technically focussed.

== July 05,2005 Moving on to OLSR ==

I left Peebles Valley at the end of May and this is the first return since then. David and I are migrating all the Linksys boxes from Sveasoft to OpenWrt, specifically the builds produced by Freifunk which has a nice web interface. Lassy has joined us again and is helping us move the equipment around.

The task involves loading the Freifunk firmware onto the box. This requires local connectivity. We still had connection problem until we discovered the ghosts of a WDS past. Alot of WDS settings were still on each of the boxes. We've now had to go and remove those especially the Lazy WDS mode settings which keep establishing bridges. OLSR looks like the right solution. Its the same amount of work as WDS setup but you get real routes, ones that you see and can traceroute through so you can actually see exactly how packets are being routed on the network. I'm much much happier. Yesterday we got USAID, ACTS_VSAT and ACTS_FLATS converted. Today we are in the field with a film crew and will migrate: AGNUS house, SIKILE_HIGH and FARM_COBUS. If we can get traffic from either Agnus' house or Cobus' farm then we know that the protocol is good, both these points would have to route through. SIKILE, USAID, ACTS_FLATS then ACTS_VSAT. WDS could never do that and if we can get this working then the mesh is good and we can move onto the next challenging problem.

At the last conservancy meeting at which ACTS clinic was present they mentioned the Mesh but all the farmers were wondering when exactly anything would happen. Hopefully we have a working system before we leave.

We also spoke to Frans Benz whose property is below USAID and he is still interested.

Of the nodes that we have observed all were powered up except ACTS_VSAT this was good as it means that people are leaving the equipment to do its job. THe VSAT was down because the plug is just too close to a useful double adapter.

We have brought 300m of CAT5 cable which the clinic will use to run cable from the VSat to the Flat so we can eliminate one node and use it elsewhere. This clinic has arranged conduit and pulling of the cables.

== February 19, 2005, Lessons learned from week long meshing ==

Lessons learnt

* Test test test: test devices in a known controlled environment. The box couldn't connect and we weren't sure exactly why.
* Use your own stuff: don't use other peoples stuff. We tried to use the alarm companies mast, it was rubbish and about to fall down. But it could also endanger our equipment when the alarm company removes there antennae.
* Equipment: cover for your laptop so you can see the screen. Backpack/fishing jacket also a head- mounted display wouldn't hurt (to monitor the wireless network). Rifle-mounted antennae with sight. Tri-pod for temporary mounting of equipment. Ladders are a problem you need a long extension ladder about 6m.
* Windows Sucks: we had major packet drop yet on Linux the network pings work perfectly. Either Windows has a simple and incompetant network layer or it puts so much rubbish on the network that it sucks up all bandwidth. Why do people use this rubbish!
* Testing protocol: It would be usefull to have a set standard of how you tackle problem. Many time you go down the wrong route. Simple idea: mount antennae with laptop and get signal strengths right. Then connect box browse to the box over the wire and check for links. Lastly connect to the box as a wireless client.

Observations on the first stage

The object of this exercise was for David and I to learn how to setup the equipment before involving the community. This objective has been met: the mesh functions well, we can monitor it and we can use it from any node.
Successes

We created a 4 node mesh that works and can connect to the Internet. Although we had issues these were just teething problem for the technicians and the hardware is really box-drop ready. This is really positive for a non-technical mesh community.

We met with the farmers and they now know what we are doing which give us easier access to their properties. The USAid couple were very helpful, very keen and are well known and liked in the community. We hope that this relationship and them being early users will help increase adoption within the farming community.

We validated that we can connect to the school through the USAid node. Although our contact at the school was on sick leave the principle made arrangements for another teacher to stay after school on Friday for almost 4 hours while we attempted to setup their node. We also noted the school now has a 15 seat computer lab.

The ACTS clinic staff were quite excited especially those that are volunteers from overseas. A number of ideas for the use of the network were put forward by the staff. These included using house bound AIDS patients to data capture for the clinic or simply to create new virtual relationships. Also suggested was using instant messaging as a form of anonymous counciling to allow school pupils to speak openly about AIDS.
Issues noted

Support! We have already got our first support call from people who use operating system that know better then you what they want to do. This is a source of potential problems as people will phone the clinic and overbuden an already busy staff. We need to investigate how the community can provide that support or busget to pay for such support.

Lightning! This is going to be a serious problem, there are solutions such as mast spikes that we need to install.

Power downs. The clinic powers off most of their equipment at night thus taking the gateway down. We need to look at way to keep this up. The conection also require human intervention and we need to investigate automation of this taks.

Network separation. The mesh is currently on the clinic network. The clinic does deal with sensitive data but also for security and management issues we need to seperate the neworks from each other.

Usage monitoring, charging. We need to begin monitoring and controlling usage so that we can explore charging models in the future.

Windows... it puts junk on the network. We need to look at simple firewall rules on the nodes to drop NetBEUI junk from the network.
Next steps

We will return to the site in a months time. At this time we wish to: separate the networks, install the school node, install a monitoring and access control system and announce a training course for the following month.

We will separate the networks by installing a new network card on the firewall. Most probably we will use NoCatAuth to control access to the network but need to investigate alternatives.

Other things to investigate are models for charging for network usage. Currently our strategy is to have farmers cross-subsidise the schools connectivity. A problem with this however is that other forms of connectivity are becoming relatively cheap (3G, etc) so this still needs to be reasonable.

== February 19, 2005, Too much sun for a geek ==

Day 4: Had steak at the conservancy meeting. Talked a little about the mesh - nobody understood what I was tgalking about... But getting cheap Internet sounded cool to them. The farmers have serious problem with Telk^h^h^h^h connectivity, phones, lightning, macadamia thieves, water, etc.

Day 5: Dave J works for a big parastatal like company which means he always comes late cause someone wants him to do something (he tells me he was fighting Jhb traffic to get more Linksys boxes. Mainly spent the morning getting ntop (a great network monitoring tool working) and got EtherApe (nice graphical monitoring tool) working. These are quite good for seeing how badly Windows abuses network resources.

Spent the afternoon with David at Sikhile High. Was pretty fruitless we couldn't work out if it was the box, antennae, or sun that was messing us around.

Day 6: Installed the USAid node properly. Took a long time and got really sunburned. Note to self need a ladder, suntan lotion, umbrella and LOTS of water. Installed a 90deg patch panel. We had major problems getting links to the clinic which was frustrating.

== February 17, 2005, More meshing ==

Day 3 cont...: Got USAid online, had been switched off not blown up by lightning. Phew. Installed a second mesh point which proved not to be needed. Worked out how to add parameters to the Kismet display, only worked out later that the signal strength bar graph is completely arbitrary. Will need to check all that again today. Installed an AP on the accomodation block, this seems a waste and we will probnably run cable from an AP installed on the staff flats instead.

Day 4: David J should be joining me today and we will be meeting with the farmers in the conservancy for a braai. I hope that we can raise the issue of what we are building and get people excited. Just before leaving yesterday I got everything up: I can ping all the other APs and can get out onto the net. I'll be checking this again remotely to see if I can get from USAid, to the clinic and out.

== February 16, 2005, Meshing ==

I've had a busy few days here in Peables Valley:

Day 1: Setup a linksys on the roof of the clinic. Found that we really can't see Petra from here or anywhere actually, Petra is a nice high point but all buildings are hidden behind a large rock. We installed one at a house belonging to consultants for USAid. This is a good site as we can see the staff flats from there but none of the other buildings. The problem with this is we now need to find a good spot at the clinic so that we can see USAid without using two APs at the clinic.

I visited the school, unfortunately Mr Sihlabela is off ill until March. I met with the principal and two other teachers and have agreed to visit on Friday with David. The school can see USAid but we still need to confirm the signal strength.

In discussions with various people I realised that lightning is going to be a serious problem. With all the equipment on an AP costing about R2,000 it can cripple a network if they have a serious strike.

Day 2: A frustrating day trying to get Kismet working. This involved creating a patched kernel to allow the orinoco driver to go into Monitor mode. Finding, downloading and compiling takes a long time. I did manage to get onto the clinic roof and confirm that we couldn't see a signal from USAid. We did get a signal from the staff flats.

In discussing uses for the network we had some new ideas:

* Getting house ridden patients a computer to get them communicating and getting outside virtually.
* Having the same patient do data capturing to bolster his income
* We also talked about using SMS and cellphones for compliance. Setting alarms for medicine taking. SMS messages that require a reply to check compliance. Notifying support group buddies about people not replying to SMS notification so that they can check that they're OK.

Day 3: Kismet is working! Not all the information is that useful for what I need to do. Met the clinic staff today to try and explain what we're doing. Today I'm checking signal strength from the school, its seems however that USAid is offline.

== February 11, 2005, Equipment got ==

We now have the equipment for the FMFI Wireless project in Mpumalanga. We have 10 Linksys wireless AP which we're firmware upgrading. The cards are in a nice heavy duty all weather box. A picture would be great :). All the boxes are being moded to do power over ethernet which makes hte whole installation clean and simple. Currently it looks like costs are around R2,000 a node.

I'm lugging the lot down to White River this weekend and will erect 3 of the nodes. Mainly to test equipment and get a working initial network. The other nodes will be setup by the community, following the Onno Purbo style of network deployment.

Mpumulanga Mesh

2006-01-04T16:27:37Z

Kilos: /* Technology Explained */

== Location ==

White River is a medium sized town about 20 minutes north of Nelspruit, the capital of Mpumalanga Province. Peables Valley and the Masoi Tribal land is located 20 minutes to the North East of White River along the road leading to the Kruger National Parks Numbi gate.

The area is hilly with some large granite outcrops. The Peables Valley stretches from the ACTS clinic and divides the commercial farms from the Masoi area. Commercial farming in the broader area is predominately timber but fortunately along the valley there is no timber farming (this would pose a connectivity problem and impact line of sight requirements). The farmers as a community are already well connected (organisationally not in terms of Internet connectivity) with commando like structures in place because of crime.

The ACTS clinic is located at the beginning of the Valley. ACTS stands for AIDS Care Training and Support Clinic. They provide medical services to AIDS patients, councilling, testing and Anti-retroviral (ARV) treatment. The clinic has gained a reputation within the community with many people coming from outside of the Masoyi area for treatment. They are have been selected for managing ARV roleout because of their well developed councilling, testing and support group networks. Currently they have about 200 people on ARVs with this figure likely to grow to over 600. These treatements are being monitored by researchers at WITS University.

The Masoyi area runs along the right hand side of the valley. We identified approximately 10 schools, with two identified as being high schools with computer facilities. The project team has good links to a teacher in one of these schools who is in charge of the computer lab. In the area there is also a teachers training centre, government hospital and various government clinics in the area. The ACTS clinic runs a hospice close to one of the Government clinics.

== Situation in the Community ==

The community is underserviced. Most roads remain unpaved with the main road having been rebuilt after the floods of 2000. Electricity is available within the community.
The community is poor and has been hugely impacted by AIDS. Losing salaried member of households through AIDS has a bi impact on extended families. There is also the associated superstition and secretiveness around AIDS which does not help improve the situation.

== ACTS clinic ==

The clinic is a non-profit organisation established to provide AIDS care in the Masoyi area. It was initially sponsored by Glaxo Smithcline. The clinic has two doctors, an onsite hospice, training centre and accomodation for people on training courses.

A number of staff have been trained to provide pre-test and post-test councilling. This leaves the doctors free to focus on the medical aspects of treatment. The clinic operates in many ways like a private doctors practice. They charge consultation fees and patients on medical aid are charged accordingly. They however usually waive all fees as soon as it is established that a patient is suffering from AIDS. The clinic is relatively sopphisticated in their use of computers: they run practice management software, are connected to the Internet via Vsat for their research with WITS. They also have some custom MS Access based applications written internally to track patient statistics.

== Proposed Solution ==

Deploy a mesh network within the Peables Valley, run training courses to transfer skills on mesh setup and installation, work together with the clinic staff using Free Attitude Interviews (FAI) to discover applications and uses that work for the staff.

== What problem is being addressed ==

The main thrust is to connect the clinic to its community hospice and thus allow them to extend their computer facilities to the hospice (practise management software and statistics gathering). This is most easily achieved through a wireless network and more specifically a mesh because of the terrain.

A mesh network requires a number of nodes in areas not owned by the clinic but that are part of the commuity: schools and farmers. The main thrust of the research question is to implement the network in such a way that the firstly the clinic and secondly the community have taken ownership of the network. That they have created systems that ensure that the infrastructure is maintained and expanded by the users of the network.

== Technology Explained ==

A wireless network involves radios and aerials. The radios broadcast and receive signals which are boosted and directed by the arials. Anyone with a radio can access the network. The spectrum used for Wifi required line-of-sight for connectivity. The routes between sites are also hard coded or manually adjusted in each device. This makes it technically difficult on two levels. Firstly, you need a deaper understanding or the radio spectrum and the operation of radio wave and secondly, configuration of the equipment requires a higher level of skill.

A mesh network uses the same infrastructure: aerials and radios. But at the network level it operated differently. The network simply requires that each node can see at least one other node (ie it can be part of the network) and that each node can send trafic to any node on the network (ie there are no islands which are not connected to the whole). In a mesh network this problem is solved at the software level. As long as your node can see another node it will be able to determine the routes to follow. The also allows for a level of self healing and thus less maintenance. If for example a truck parks in from of the node or a tree grows up over time and block the signal to another node then as long as the node can see an alternate node it can route traffic via this new path. On a conventional wireless network this would need to be manually configured.

The choice of mesh in the Peables Valley was made for these reasons:
Hilly terrain that requires a number of hops to reach the destination
Low skilled network operators
Changing conditions in the environment. Nodes that disappear through neglect, theft, obstruction.

== Social Challenges ==

There are a number of social challenges:

Firstly, for the the network to operate to serivice firstly the clinic and secondly the community it requires the cooperations of teachers in schools and of farmers. They all have there own agenda's there own perceptions of their expected level of involvment and their expectation of how aid is given to them.

In the school we are concerned about a hand-out mentality that will not see the school working hard to be involved in the extension of the mesh but simply being involved as long as it takes to link the school to the Internet. There is also the risk of our contact at the school wanting to be seen as being in charge and not wanting to work together with schools in the community.

To addess that we are looking at bringing the school pupils into the process from the beginning and teaching them how to install and configure equipment.

Secondly, with the farmers we are confident that it will be easy to sell them the concept of Internet connectivity. However, for the network to work for them will require that they connect to schools in the Masoyi area. We are not certain about the realtionship between these two groups. Considering the crime levels there is the risk that there is not a good level of trust.

Our strategy is to involve people from both groups during training workshops. Which at the very least would allow realtionships to be established.

Lastly, this is not the primary focus of the ACTS clinic so there will always be the risk that people are redeployed.

However, our main contact in the clinic is an electrical engineer by profession and the clinic itself has proved that they are a teaching organisation (their previous garder now runs the reception).

== Technical Challenges ==

Mesh networks are a new phenomena with the software sometimes not yet at the level required for the mesh to operate well. There is the risk that in this project we will discover the limitations of the technology and have to spend time compensating for that.

Some of the endpoint nodes we have identified require many hops. This requires many nodes. This is both a social and technical challenge. Social in that the project needs to bring each of those players on board and technical in that each of those nodes needs to be built, deployed and maintained.

There is also the risk of theft. The node equipment has very little commercial resale value in the community, although there seems to be wifi operating in the Nelspruit, White River area. However, that never seems to be a consideration of petty thieves. Hopefully deploying the equipment in established locations: schools, shops, private homes and not simply in the open will help secure the equipment.

== Equipment Ownership ==

As the objective is to create a community based network where the network is seen as a community asset so therefore some of the equipment at key nodes should belong to the community. Official ownership will be with the ACTS clinic until such time as a more formal structure for ownership of key mesh equipment can be established.

As the mesh grows individual node owners will own their own equipment. So a farmer or school will be the owner of that equipment and it will form part of the mesh. It is hoped that farmers will partner with institutions such as schools in which case the partners will define ownership relationships.

The project does not envision supplying any equipment to farmers unless they are located such that having equipment on their farm is critical to creating the mesh. In such as case we would look at funding that node if the project has to but the project will still attempt to have the farmer install his/her own equipment.

== Intellectual Property ==

The project will release all work under a suitable Open Source license. This work includes documentation and results of the research.

The project will not be developing any independent software but will be using other freely available mesh software. In the case that software is improved or modified it will be released under the license of the original software project to ensure that it can be included in future releases of that software.

== Sustainability ==

A key component to sustainability will be involvement of the farmers, Bible colleges, etc within the Peables Valley. The project will draw in the farmers for the following reasons: 1) they are a source of skills, 2) they have finances to pay for Internet connectivity and 3) that once they become users they are likely to become dependent on the mesh and thus ensure its ongoing success.

Part of the program will be to educate participants from the start so that they can extend the reach of the mesh. Included will be education of pupils from the partner schools. This education is designed to ensure that enough skills are available in the valley to repair nodes, setup new nodes, manage the mesh and train others.

A key component to the sustainability is that the project manager as the ACTS clinic is a qualified electrical engineer. We are therefore confident that it will not be difficult to educate him on the workings of the mesh network. He has already demonstrated his excitement and commitment to the project by spending a Saturday with the project leaders evaluating high sites. He is involved in training staff and is extremely practical so will be invaluable in erecting high sites.

== Pros and Cons of the system ==

First considering some positive aspects of the mesh. Firstly the clinic is already using IT infrastructure in the following areas: ARV monitoring, clinic management and accounts. Farmer, bible colleges, etc in the community already use the Internet for email etc but usually at great cost because of the limited choice of commectivity options. The partner schools already has a lab that has in the past been connected to the Internet. So there is already a body of people who have demonstrated the willingness or need to use the Internet who we feel would be willing the use a mesh if it provide always on and lower Internet connectivity costs.

The potential problems we see are the following. There is the risk that the effort to manage or be part of the mesh may be more expensive then direct connection especially in the case of the lack of good neighbourliness from any mesh participant. The clinic, although they currently use IT extensively, may in fact not need to extend that usage beyond the main clinic. The risk with the schools we feel is that there is a general hand-out mentality and that there will not be the will to learn, extend the network or integrate this into the curriculum. Another large risk is the sustainability of the network not from the mesh side but from the side of financing the hop onto the Internet itself.

== Backhaul Connectivity ==

The connectivity to ACTS is provided via Telkom VSAT. ACTS uses the connection as part of their involvement in ARV roleout for the Right To Care group. They have an Internet based application for capturing details of patients for monitoring and evaluating patients receiving ARVs

== Network Topology ==

[[Image:Acts meshnet.jpg]]

== News Flashes ==

== September 22, 2005, WiFi in the bush or the plot ==

Duane visited the IDRC funded workshop for WiFi in Africa. Sorry don't know what the real project name is. Sat in on the session on regulation, the Department of Communications delegates decided that this would be a good time to leave. Nice when you know you can't actually stand the heat.

Had a look at their cantenna based access-point liming over about 5km. With a Linksys strapped to a tree with... red tape... man we can't get away from red tape in this industry.

Most surprising was plot.net a local WISP that delivers Internet to about 100 customers and nobody new that they existed before booking the venue. They do long haul links to ADSL connections in Pretoria. Quite an innovative solution to high cost access. I want to explore that possibility in Peebles Valley.

== October 06, 2005 Wikipedia on the mesh ==

David and I visited the Peebles Mesh this week for two days and here is
a quick synopsis of events:

- We installed a firewall. This has software which should allow us to
control and cap bandwidth and it separates us from the clinic.
- We installed a local copy of Wikipedia. Still some bugs but very fast
- We can now access the site remotely

Big SURPRISE

Our cantennae was still operating! We did a data transfer from the
wireless box to ourselves. 3 hops I think at 192kB/s

First farmer online

We connected the chairman of the local farmers group to the Internet.
It was lovely we just watched and took notes. The farmers younger
brother had returned from the UK with a new laptop. We got that
connected. The first thing he asked is if he could download music - ho
hum :)

The sister of the farmer was also visiting and started giving her mother
a sales pitch about how they could talk to each other using skype for
free.

Was lovely to watch and we had boere kos but arrived a bit late for
lunch. We will ensure that doesn't happen again.

== July 06, 2005, Realisation of a mesh vision ==

Today we had a film crew filming the installation of a mesh node. It was great fun but they did waste our time a bit. Technically this is what we got done:

* Installed the node on Agnus' house permanently. Lassy did all this work
* Put a 3m pole at the Hospice to see if we can get over the ridge
* Upgraded AGNUS, HOSPICE and SIKILE to OpenWrt
* The clinic is cabled to various buildings so we will be able to recover one node and just run a cable from the FLATS node to the VSAT.

We had a 7ms delay between AGNUS and ACTS_VSAT which is a route that passes through all present nodes. VoIP is now truely achievable. Wonderful performance compared to WDS mode. Throw out WDS wherever you see it its just not worth the effort. It is honestly more simple to setup OLSR. Glad we've learnt that and can move on.

We still have the following technical hurdles to overcome. The default route keeps disappearing. We need to install a proper firewall. Once that is done we can move onto the community adoption.

The day was full of some lovely experiences of the potential of what we are doing.

Once we had AGNUS up we setup Dave's laptop and had Agnus' daughter and a neighbour sit at the computer. Dave opened Google. They didn't know what to do. We asked them what information they wanted to know. Stuck again. "Who is your favourite singer?" - Alicia Keys - "OK type that in the search box, then click on search" - Shouts of glee as the search results return. "Now click here". Off they went to Alecia Keys home site and disappeared for about 10 minutes. Does that count as training? The two of them were sitting inside quite a dark house, they sat together on a sofa and the laptop screen glowed in the semi-dark with their face highlighted. This exact image was the vision I had for this project. So that made my day.

I did a quick training course in the dirt. Explaining what the different aerials did, how it all fitted together. And of course how to use a high-gain antenna as a fish braai. Lassy provided Swati translation as soon as there was any confusion.

Now off to the school to film students working on computers. They wanted to interview the teacher, who was a standing in for Mr Sihlabela who we usualy work with. "What will you use the Internet for at your school", to which he replied, "I don't know". David did a quick exercise of taking the teacher, a history teacher, to Google. They Googled for "Shaka Zulu" and ended up at a very good site on the subject. "What will you use the Internet for at your school", and we got a 5 minute reply. Does that count as training?

What worked best about this trip was having a very focused objective - get the mesh network working. We didn't care about the firewall, the billing, shapping, etc. And we got it done. The next trips will be similarly technically focussed.

== July 05,2005 Moving on to OLSR ==

I left Peebles Valley at the end of May and this is the first return since then. David and I are migrating all the Linksys boxes from Sveasoft to OpenWrt, specifically the builds produced by Freifunk which has a nice web interface. Lassy has joined us again and is helping us move the equipment around.

The task involves loading the Freifunk firmware onto the box. This requires local connectivity. We still had connection problem until we discovered the ghosts of a WDS past. Alot of WDS settings were still on each of the boxes. We've now had to go and remove those especially the Lazy WDS mode settings which keep establishing bridges. OLSR looks like the right solution. Its the same amount of work as WDS setup but you get real routes, ones that you see and can traceroute through so you can actually see exactly how packets are being routed on the network. I'm much much happier. Yesterday we got USAID, ACTS_VSAT and ACTS_FLATS converted. Today we are in the field with a film crew and will migrate: AGNUS house, SIKILE_HIGH and FARM_COBUS. If we can get traffic from either Agnus' house or Cobus' farm then we know that the protocol is good, both these points would have to route through. SIKILE, USAID, ACTS_FLATS then ACTS_VSAT. WDS could never do that and if we can get this working then the mesh is good and we can move onto the next challenging problem.

At the last conservancy meeting at which ACTS clinic was present they mentioned the Mesh but all the farmers were wondering when exactly anything would happen. Hopefully we have a working system before we leave.

We also spoke to Frans Benz whose property is below USAID and he is still interested.

Of the nodes that we have observed all were powered up except ACTS_VSAT this was good as it means that people are leaving the equipment to do its job. THe VSAT was down because the plug is just too close to a useful double adapter.

We have brought 300m of CAT5 cable which the clinic will use to run cable from the VSat to the Flat so we can eliminate one node and use it elsewhere. This clinic has arranged conduit and pulling of the cables.

== February 19, 2005, Lessons learned from week long meshing ==

Lessons learnt

* Test test test: test devices in a known controlled environment. The box couldn't connect and we weren't sure exactly why.
* Use your own stuff: don't use other peoples stuff. We tried to use the alarm companies mast, it was rubbish and about to fall down. But it could also endanger our equipment when the alarm company removes there antennae.
* Equipment: cover for your laptop so you can see the screen. Backpack/fishing jacket also a head- mounted display wouldn't hurt (to monitor the wireless network). Rifle-mounted antennae with sight. Tri-pod for temporary mounting of equipment. Ladders are a problem you need a long extension ladder about 6m.
* Windows Sucks: we had major packet drop yet on Linux the network pings work perfectly. Either Windows has a simple and incompetant network layer or it puts so much rubbish on the network that it sucks up all bandwidth. Why do people use this rubbish!
* Testing protocol: It would be usefull to have a set standard of how you tackle problem. Many time you go down the wrong route. Simple idea: mount antennae with laptop and get signal strengths right. Then connect box browse to the box over the wire and check for links. Lastly connect to the box as a wireless client.

Observations on the first stage

The object of this exercise was for David and I to learn how to setup the equipment before involving the community. This objective has been met: the mesh functions well, we can monitor it and we can use it from any node.
Successes

We created a 4 node mesh that works and can connect to the Internet. Although we had issues these were just teething problem for the technicians and the hardware is really box-drop ready. This is really positive for a non-technical mesh community.

We met with the farmers and they now know what we are doing which give us easier access to their properties. The USAid couple were very helpful, very keen and are well known and liked in the community. We hope that this relationship and them being early users will help increase adoption within the farming community.

We validated that we can connect to the school through the USAid node. Although our contact at the school was on sick leave the principle made arrangements for another teacher to stay after school on Friday for almost 4 hours while we attempted to setup their node. We also noted the school now has a 15 seat computer lab.

The ACTS clinic staff were quite excited especially those that are volunteers from overseas. A number of ideas for the use of the network were put forward by the staff. These included using house bound AIDS patients to data capture for the clinic or simply to create new virtual relationships. Also suggested was using instant messaging as a form of anonymous counciling to allow school pupils to speak openly about AIDS.
Issues noted

Support! We have already got our first support call from people who use operating system that know better then you what they want to do. This is a source of potential problems as people will phone the clinic and overbuden an already busy staff. We need to investigate how the community can provide that support or busget to pay for such support.

Lightning! This is going to be a serious problem, there are solutions such as mast spikes that we need to install.

Power downs. The clinic powers off most of their equipment at night thus taking the gateway down. We need to look at way to keep this up. The conection also require human intervention and we need to investigate automation of this taks.

Network separation. The mesh is currently on the clinic network. The clinic does deal with sensitive data but also for security and management issues we need to seperate the neworks from each other.

Usage monitoring, charging. We need to begin monitoring and controlling usage so that we can explore charging models in the future.

Windows... it puts junk on the network. We need to look at simple firewall rules on the nodes to drop NetBEUI junk from the network.
Next steps

We will return to the site in a months time. At this time we wish to: separate the networks, install the school node, install a monitoring and access control system and announce a training course for the following month.

We will separate the networks by installing a new network card on the firewall. Most probably we will use NoCatAuth to control access to the network but need to investigate alternatives.

Other things to investigate are models for charging for network usage. Currently our strategy is to have farmers cross-subsidise the schools connectivity. A problem with this however is that other forms of connectivity are becoming relatively cheap (3G, etc) so this still needs to be reasonable.

== February 19, 2005, Too much sun for a geek ==

Day 4: Had steak at the conservancy meeting. Talked a little about the mesh - nobody understood what I was tgalking about... But getting cheap Internet sounded cool to them. The farmers have serious problem with Telk^h^h^h^h connectivity, phones, lightning, macadamia thieves, water, etc.

Day 5: Dave J works for a big parastatal like company which means he always comes late cause someone wants him to do something (he tells me he was fighting Jhb traffic to get more Linksys boxes. Mainly spent the morning getting ntop (a great network monitoring tool working) and got EtherApe (nice graphical monitoring tool) working. These are quite good for seeing how badly Windows abuses network resources.

Spent the afternoon with David at Sikhile High. Was pretty fruitless we couldn't work out if it was the box, antennae, or sun that was messing us around.

Day 6: Installed the USAid node properly. Took a long time and got really sunburned. Note to self need a ladder, suntan lotion, umbrella and LOTS of water. Installed a 90deg patch panel. We had major problems getting links to the clinic which was frustrating.

== February 17, 2005, More meshing ==

Day 3 cont...: Got USAid online, had been switched off not blown up by lightning. Phew. Installed a second mesh point which proved not to be needed. Worked out how to add parameters to the Kismet display, only worked out later that the signal strength bar graph is completely arbitrary. Will need to check all that again today. Installed an AP on the accomodation block, this seems a waste and we will probnably run cable from an AP installed on the staff flats instead.

Day 4: David J should be joining me today and we will be meeting with the farmers in the conservancy for a braai. I hope that we can raise the issue of what we are building and get people excited. Just before leaving yesterday I got everything up: I can ping all the other APs and can get out onto the net. I'll be checking this again remotely to see if I can get from USAid, to the clinic and out.

== February 16, 2005, Meshing ==

I've had a busy few days here in Peables Valley:

Day 1: Setup a linksys on the roof of the clinic. Found that we really can't see Petra from here or anywhere actually, Petra is a nice high point but all buildings are hidden behind a large rock. We installed one at a house belonging to consultants for USAid. This is a good site as we can see the staff flats from there but none of the other buildings. The problem with this is we now need to find a good spot at the clinic so that we can see USAid without using two APs at the clinic.

I visited the school, unfortunately Mr Sihlabela is off ill until March. I met with the principal and two other teachers and have agreed to visit on Friday with David. The school can see USAid but we still need to confirm the signal strength.

In discussions with various people I realised that lightning is going to be a serious problem. With all the equipment on an AP costing about R2,000 it can cripple a network if they have a serious strike.

Day 2: A frustrating day trying to get Kismet working. This involved creating a patched kernel to allow the orinoco driver to go into Monitor mode. Finding, downloading and compiling takes a long time. I did manage to get onto the clinic roof and confirm that we couldn't see a signal from USAid. We did get a signal from the staff flats.

In discussing uses for the network we had some new ideas:

* Getting house ridden patients a computer to get them communicating and getting outside virtually.
* Having the same patient do data capturing to bolster his income
* We also talked about using SMS and cellphones for compliance. Setting alarms for medicine taking. SMS messages that require a reply to check compliance. Notifying support group buddies about people not replying to SMS notification so that they can check that they're OK.

Day 3: Kismet is working! Not all the information is that useful for what I need to do. Met the clinic staff today to try and explain what we're doing. Today I'm checking signal strength from the school, its seems however that USAid is offline.

== February 11, 2005, Equipment got ==

We now have the equipment for the FMFI Wireless project in Mpumalanga. We have 10 Linksys wireless AP which we're firmware upgrading. The cards are in a nice heavy duty all weather box. A picture would be great :). All the boxes are being moded to do power over ethernet which makes hte whole installation clean and simple. Currently it looks like costs are around R2,000 a node.

I'm lugging the lot down to White River this weekend and will erect 3 of the nodes. Mainly to test equipment and get a working initial network. The other nodes will be setup by the community, following the Onno Purbo style of network deployment.

Mpumulanga Mesh

2006-01-04T16:24:27Z

Kilos: /* September 22, 2005, WiFi in the bush or the plot */

== Location ==

White River is a medium sized town about 20 minutes north of Nelspruit, the capital of Mpumalanga Province. Peables Valley and the Masoi Tribal land is located 20 minutes to the North East of White River along the road leading to the Kruger National Parks Numbi gate.

The area is hilly with some large granite outcrops. The Peables Valley stretches from the ACTS clinic and divides the commercial farms from the Masoi area. Commercial farming in the broader area is predominately timber but fortunately along the valley there is no timber farming (this would pose a connectivity problem and impact line of sight requirements). The farmers as a community are already well connected (organisationally not in terms of Internet connectivity) with commando like structures in place because of crime.

The ACTS clinic is located at the beginning of the Valley. ACTS stands for AIDS Care Training and Support Clinic. They provide medical services to AIDS patients, councilling, testing and Anti-retroviral (ARV) treatment. The clinic has gained a reputation within the community with many people coming from outside of the Masoyi area for treatment. They are have been selected for managing ARV roleout because of their well developed councilling, testing and support group networks. Currently they have about 200 people on ARVs with this figure likely to grow to over 600. These treatements are being monitored by researchers at WITS University.

The Masoyi area runs along the right hand side of the valley. We identified approximately 10 schools, with two identified as being high schools with computer facilities. The project team has good links to a teacher in one of these schools who is in charge of the computer lab. In the area there is also a teachers training centre, government hospital and various government clinics in the area. The ACTS clinic runs a hospice close to one of the Government clinics.

== Situation in the Community ==

The community is underserviced. Most roads remain unpaved with the main road having been rebuilt after the floods of 2000. Electricity is available within the community.
The community is poor and has been hugely impacted by AIDS. Losing salaried member of households through AIDS has a bi impact on extended families. There is also the associated superstition and secretiveness around AIDS which does not help improve the situation.

== ACTS clinic ==

The clinic is a non-profit organisation established to provide AIDS care in the Masoyi area. It was initially sponsored by Glaxo Smithcline. The clinic has two doctors, an onsite hospice, training centre and accomodation for people on training courses.

A number of staff have been trained to provide pre-test and post-test councilling. This leaves the doctors free to focus on the medical aspects of treatment. The clinic operates in many ways like a private doctors practice. They charge consultation fees and patients on medical aid are charged accordingly. They however usually waive all fees as soon as it is established that a patient is suffering from AIDS. The clinic is relatively sopphisticated in their use of computers: they run practice management software, are connected to the Internet via Vsat for their research with WITS. They also have some custom MS Access based applications written internally to track patient statistics.

== Proposed Solution ==

Deploy a mesh network within the Peables Valley, run training courses to transfer skills on mesh setup and installation, work together with the clinic staff using Free Attitude Interviews (FAI) to discover applications and uses that work for the staff.

== What problem is being addressed ==

The main thrust is to connect the clinic to its community hospice and thus allow them to extend their computer facilities to the hospice (practise management software and statistics gathering). This is most easily achieved through a wireless network and more specifically a mesh because of the terrain.

A mesh network requires a number of nodes in areas not owned by the clinic but that are part of the commuity: schools and farmers. The main thrust of the research question is to implement the network in such a way that the firstly the clinic and secondly the community have taken ownership of the network. That they have created systems that ensure that the infrastructure is maintained and expanded by the users of the network.

== Technology Explained ==

A wireless network involves radios and arials. The radios broadcast and receive signals which are boosted and directed by the arials. Anyone with a radio can access the network. The spectrum used for Wifi required line-of-sight for connectivity. The routes between sites are also hard coded or manually adjusted in each device. This makes it technically difficult on two levels. Firstly, you need a deaper understanding or the radio spectrum and the operation of radio wave and secondly, configuration of the equipment requires a higher level of skill.

A mesh network uses the same infrastructure: aerials and radios. But at the network level it operated differently. The network simply requires that each node can see at least one other node (ie it can be part of the network) and that each node can send trafic to any node on the network (ie there are no islands which are not connected to the whole). In a mesh network this problem is solved at the software level. As long as your node can see another node it will be able to determine the routes to follow. The also allows for a level of self healing and thus less maintenance. If for example a truck parks in from of the node or a tree grows up over time and block the signal to another node then as long as the node can see an alternate node it can route traffic via this new path. On a conventional wireless network this would need to be manually configured.

The choice of mesh in the Peables Valley was made for these reasons:
Hilly terrain that requires a number of hops to reach the destination
Low skilled network operators
Changing conditions in the environment. Nodes that disappear through neglect, theft, obstruction.

== Social Challenges ==

There are a number of social challenges:

Firstly, for the the network to operate to serivice firstly the clinic and secondly the community it requires the cooperations of teachers in schools and of farmers. They all have there own agenda's there own perceptions of their expected level of involvment and their expectation of how aid is given to them.

In the school we are concerned about a hand-out mentality that will not see the school working hard to be involved in the extension of the mesh but simply being involved as long as it takes to link the school to the Internet. There is also the risk of our contact at the school wanting to be seen as being in charge and not wanting to work together with schools in the community.

To addess that we are looking at bringing the school pupils into the process from the beginning and teaching them how to install and configure equipment.

Secondly, with the farmers we are confident that it will be easy to sell them the concept of Internet connectivity. However, for the network to work for them will require that they connect to schools in the Masoyi area. We are not certain about the realtionship between these two groups. Considering the crime levels there is the risk that there is not a good level of trust.

Our strategy is to involve people from both groups during training workshops. Which at the very least would allow realtionships to be established.

Lastly, this is not the primary focus of the ACTS clinic so there will always be the risk that people are redeployed.

However, our main contact in the clinic is an electrical engineer by profession and the clinic itself has proved that they are a teaching organisation (their previous garder now runs the reception).

== Technical Challenges ==

Mesh networks are a new phenomena with the software sometimes not yet at the level required for the mesh to operate well. There is the risk that in this project we will discover the limitations of the technology and have to spend time compensating for that.

Some of the endpoint nodes we have identified require many hops. This requires many nodes. This is both a social and technical challenge. Social in that the project needs to bring each of those players on board and technical in that each of those nodes needs to be built, deployed and maintained.

There is also the risk of theft. The node equipment has very little commercial resale value in the community, although there seems to be wifi operating in the Nelspruit, White River area. However, that never seems to be a consideration of petty thieves. Hopefully deploying the equipment in established locations: schools, shops, private homes and not simply in the open will help secure the equipment.

== Equipment Ownership ==

As the objective is to create a community based network where the network is seen as a community asset so therefore some of the equipment at key nodes should belong to the community. Official ownership will be with the ACTS clinic until such time as a more formal structure for ownership of key mesh equipment can be established.

As the mesh grows individual node owners will own their own equipment. So a farmer or school will be the owner of that equipment and it will form part of the mesh. It is hoped that farmers will partner with institutions such as schools in which case the partners will define ownership relationships.

The project does not envision supplying any equipment to farmers unless they are located such that having equipment on their farm is critical to creating the mesh. In such as case we would look at funding that node if the project has to but the project will still attempt to have the farmer install his/her own equipment.

== Intellectual Property ==

The project will release all work under a suitable Open Source license. This work includes documentation and results of the research.

The project will not be developing any independent software but will be using other freely available mesh software. In the case that software is improved or modified it will be released under the license of the original software project to ensure that it can be included in future releases of that software.

== Sustainability ==

A key component to sustainability will be involvement of the farmers, Bible colleges, etc within the Peables Valley. The project will draw in the farmers for the following reasons: 1) they are a source of skills, 2) they have finances to pay for Internet connectivity and 3) that once they become users they are likely to become dependent on the mesh and thus ensure its ongoing success.

Part of the program will be to educate participants from the start so that they can extend the reach of the mesh. Included will be education of pupils from the partner schools. This education is designed to ensure that enough skills are available in the valley to repair nodes, setup new nodes, manage the mesh and train others.

A key component to the sustainability is that the project manager as the ACTS clinic is a qualified electrical engineer. We are therefore confident that it will not be difficult to educate him on the workings of the mesh network. He has already demonstrated his excitement and commitment to the project by spending a Saturday with the project leaders evaluating high sites. He is involved in training staff and is extremely practical so will be invaluable in erecting high sites.

== Pros and Cons of the system ==

First considering some positive aspects of the mesh. Firstly the clinic is already using IT infrastructure in the following areas: ARV monitoring, clinic management and accounts. Farmer, bible colleges, etc in the community already use the Internet for email etc but usually at great cost because of the limited choice of commectivity options. The partner schools already has a lab that has in the past been connected to the Internet. So there is already a body of people who have demonstrated the willingness or need to use the Internet who we feel would be willing the use a mesh if it provide always on and lower Internet connectivity costs.

The potential problems we see are the following. There is the risk that the effort to manage or be part of the mesh may be more expensive then direct connection especially in the case of the lack of good neighbourliness from any mesh participant. The clinic, although they currently use IT extensively, may in fact not need to extend that usage beyond the main clinic. The risk with the schools we feel is that there is a general hand-out mentality and that there will not be the will to learn, extend the network or integrate this into the curriculum. Another large risk is the sustainability of the network not from the mesh side but from the side of financing the hop onto the Internet itself.

== Backhaul Connectivity ==

The connectivity to ACTS is provided via Telkom VSAT. ACTS uses the connection as part of their involvement in ARV roleout for the Right To Care group. They have an Internet based application for capturing details of patients for monitoring and evaluating patients receiving ARVs

== Network Topology ==

[[Image:Acts meshnet.jpg]]

== News Flashes ==

== September 22, 2005, WiFi in the bush or the plot ==

Duane visited the IDRC funded workshop for WiFi in Africa. Sorry don't know what the real project name is. Sat in on the session on regulation, the Department of Communications delegates decided that this would be a good time to leave. Nice when you know you can't actually stand the heat.

Had a look at their cantenna based access-point liming over about 5km. With a Linksys strapped to a tree with... red tape... man we can't get away from red tape in this industry.

Most surprising was plot.net a local WISP that delivers Internet to about 100 customers and nobody new that they existed before booking the venue. They do long haul links to ADSL connections in Pretoria. Quite an innovative solution to high cost access. I want to explore that possibility in Peebles Valley.

== October 06, 2005 Wikipedia on the mesh ==

David and I visited the Peebles Mesh this week for two days and here is
a quick synopsis of events:

- We installed a firewall. This has software which should allow us to
control and cap bandwidth and it separates us from the clinic.
- We installed a local copy of Wikipedia. Still some bugs but very fast
- We can now access the site remotely

Big SURPRISE

Our cantennae was still operating! We did a data transfer from the
wireless box to ourselves. 3 hops I think at 192kB/s

First farmer online

We connected the chairman of the local farmers group to the Internet.
It was lovely we just watched and took notes. The farmers younger
brother had returned from the UK with a new laptop. We got that
connected. The first thing he asked is if he could download music - ho
hum :)

The sister of the farmer was also visiting and started giving her mother
a sales pitch about how they could talk to each other using skype for
free.

Was lovely to watch and we had boere kos but arrived a bit late for
lunch. We will ensure that doesn't happen again.

== July 06, 2005, Realisation of a mesh vision ==

Today we had a film crew filming the installation of a mesh node. It was great fun but they did waste our time a bit. Technically this is what we got done:

* Installed the node on Agnus' house permanently. Lassy did all this work
* Put a 3m pole at the Hospice to see if we can get over the ridge
* Upgraded AGNUS, HOSPICE and SIKILE to OpenWrt
* The clinic is cabled to various buildings so we will be able to recover one node and just run a cable from the FLATS node to the VSAT.

We had a 7ms delay between AGNUS and ACTS_VSAT which is a route that passes through all present nodes. VoIP is now truely achievable. Wonderful performance compared to WDS mode. Throw out WDS wherever you see it its just not worth the effort. It is honestly more simple to setup OLSR. Glad we've learnt that and can move on.

We still have the following technical hurdles to overcome. The default route keeps disappearing. We need to install a proper firewall. Once that is done we can move onto the community adoption.

The day was full of some lovely experiences of the potential of what we are doing.

Once we had AGNUS up we setup Dave's laptop and had Agnus' daughter and a neighbour sit at the computer. Dave opened Google. They didn't know what to do. We asked them what information they wanted to know. Stuck again. "Who is your favourite singer?" - Alicia Keys - "OK type that in the search box, then click on search" - Shouts of glee as the search results return. "Now click here". Off they went to Alecia Keys home site and disappeared for about 10 minutes. Does that count as training? The two of them were sitting inside quite a dark house, they sat together on a sofa and the laptop screen glowed in the semi-dark with their face highlighted. This exact image was the vision I had for this project. So that made my day.

I did a quick training course in the dirt. Explaining what the different aerials did, how it all fitted together. And of course how to use a high-gain antenna as a fish braai. Lassy provided Swati translation as soon as there was any confusion.

Now off to the school to film students working on computers. They wanted to interview the teacher, who was a standing in for Mr Sihlabela who we usualy work with. "What will you use the Internet for at your school", to which he replied, "I don't know". David did a quick exercise of taking the teacher, a history teacher, to Google. They Googled for "Shaka Zulu" and ended up at a very good site on the subject. "What will you use the Internet for at your school", and we got a 5 minute reply. Does that count as training?

What worked best about this trip was having a very focused objective - get the mesh network working. We didn't care about the firewall, the billing, shapping, etc. And we got it done. The next trips will be similarly technically focussed.

== July 05,2005 Moving on to OLSR ==

I left Peebles Valley at the end of May and this is the first return since then. David and I are migrating all the Linksys boxes from Sveasoft to OpenWrt, specifically the builds produced by Freifunk which has a nice web interface. Lassy has joined us again and is helping us move the equipment around.

The task involves loading the Freifunk firmware onto the box. This requires local connectivity. We still had connection problem until we discovered the ghosts of a WDS past. Alot of WDS settings were still on each of the boxes. We've now had to go and remove those especially the Lazy WDS mode settings which keep establishing bridges. OLSR looks like the right solution. Its the same amount of work as WDS setup but you get real routes, ones that you see and can traceroute through so you can actually see exactly how packets are being routed on the network. I'm much much happier. Yesterday we got USAID, ACTS_VSAT and ACTS_FLATS converted. Today we are in the field with a film crew and will migrate: AGNUS house, SIKILE_HIGH and FARM_COBUS. If we can get traffic from either Agnus' house or Cobus' farm then we know that the protocol is good, both these points would have to route through. SIKILE, USAID, ACTS_FLATS then ACTS_VSAT. WDS could never do that and if we can get this working then the mesh is good and we can move onto the next challenging problem.

At the last conservancy meeting at which ACTS clinic was present they mentioned the Mesh but all the farmers were wondering when exactly anything would happen. Hopefully we have a working system before we leave.

We also spoke to Frans Benz whose property is below USAID and he is still interested.

Of the nodes that we have observed all were powered up except ACTS_VSAT this was good as it means that people are leaving the equipment to do its job. THe VSAT was down because the plug is just too close to a useful double adapter.

We have brought 300m of CAT5 cable which the clinic will use to run cable from the VSat to the Flat so we can eliminate one node and use it elsewhere. This clinic has arranged conduit and pulling of the cables.

== February 19, 2005, Lessons learned from week long meshing ==

Lessons learnt

* Test test test: test devices in a known controlled environment. The box couldn't connect and we weren't sure exactly why.
* Use your own stuff: don't use other peoples stuff. We tried to use the alarm companies mast, it was rubbish and about to fall down. But it could also endanger our equipment when the alarm company removes there antennae.
* Equipment: cover for your laptop so you can see the screen. Backpack/fishing jacket also a head- mounted display wouldn't hurt (to monitor the wireless network). Rifle-mounted antennae with sight. Tri-pod for temporary mounting of equipment. Ladders are a problem you need a long extension ladder about 6m.
* Windows Sucks: we had major packet drop yet on Linux the network pings work perfectly. Either Windows has a simple and incompetant network layer or it puts so much rubbish on the network that it sucks up all bandwidth. Why do people use this rubbish!
* Testing protocol: It would be usefull to have a set standard of how you tackle problem. Many time you go down the wrong route. Simple idea: mount antennae with laptop and get signal strengths right. Then connect box browse to the box over the wire and check for links. Lastly connect to the box as a wireless client.

Observations on the first stage

The object of this exercise was for David and I to learn how to setup the equipment before involving the community. This objective has been met: the mesh functions well, we can monitor it and we can use it from any node.
Successes

We created a 4 node mesh that works and can connect to the Internet. Although we had issues these were just teething problem for the technicians and the hardware is really box-drop ready. This is really positive for a non-technical mesh community.

We met with the farmers and they now know what we are doing which give us easier access to their properties. The USAid couple were very helpful, very keen and are well known and liked in the community. We hope that this relationship and them being early users will help increase adoption within the farming community.

We validated that we can connect to the school through the USAid node. Although our contact at the school was on sick leave the principle made arrangements for another teacher to stay after school on Friday for almost 4 hours while we attempted to setup their node. We also noted the school now has a 15 seat computer lab.

The ACTS clinic staff were quite excited especially those that are volunteers from overseas. A number of ideas for the use of the network were put forward by the staff. These included using house bound AIDS patients to data capture for the clinic or simply to create new virtual relationships. Also suggested was using instant messaging as a form of anonymous counciling to allow school pupils to speak openly about AIDS.
Issues noted

Support! We have already got our first support call from people who use operating system that know better then you what they want to do. This is a source of potential problems as people will phone the clinic and overbuden an already busy staff. We need to investigate how the community can provide that support or busget to pay for such support.

Lightning! This is going to be a serious problem, there are solutions such as mast spikes that we need to install.

Power downs. The clinic powers off most of their equipment at night thus taking the gateway down. We need to look at way to keep this up. The conection also require human intervention and we need to investigate automation of this taks.

Network separation. The mesh is currently on the clinic network. The clinic does deal with sensitive data but also for security and management issues we need to seperate the neworks from each other.

Usage monitoring, charging. We need to begin monitoring and controlling usage so that we can explore charging models in the future.

Windows... it puts junk on the network. We need to look at simple firewall rules on the nodes to drop NetBEUI junk from the network.
Next steps

We will return to the site in a months time. At this time we wish to: separate the networks, install the school node, install a monitoring and access control system and announce a training course for the following month.

We will separate the networks by installing a new network card on the firewall. Most probably we will use NoCatAuth to control access to the network but need to investigate alternatives.

Other things to investigate are models for charging for network usage. Currently our strategy is to have farmers cross-subsidise the schools connectivity. A problem with this however is that other forms of connectivity are becoming relatively cheap (3G, etc) so this still needs to be reasonable.

== February 19, 2005, Too much sun for a geek ==

Day 4: Had steak at the conservancy meeting. Talked a little about the mesh - nobody understood what I was tgalking about... But getting cheap Internet sounded cool to them. The farmers have serious problem with Telk^h^h^h^h connectivity, phones, lightning, macadamia thieves, water, etc.

Day 5: Dave J works for a big parastatal like company which means he always comes late cause someone wants him to do something (he tells me he was fighting Jhb traffic to get more Linksys boxes. Mainly spent the morning getting ntop (a great network monitoring tool working) and got EtherApe (nice graphical monitoring tool) working. These are quite good for seeing how badly Windows abuses network resources.

Spent the afternoon with David at Sikhile High. Was pretty fruitless we couldn't work out if it was the box, antennae, or sun that was messing us around.

Day 6: Installed the USAid node properly. Took a long time and got really sunburned. Note to self need a ladder, suntan lotion, umbrella and LOTS of water. Installed a 90deg patch panel. We had major problems getting links to the clinic which was frustrating.

== February 17, 2005, More meshing ==

Day 3 cont...: Got USAid online, had been switched off not blown up by lightning. Phew. Installed a second mesh point which proved not to be needed. Worked out how to add parameters to the Kismet display, only worked out later that the signal strength bar graph is completely arbitrary. Will need to check all that again today. Installed an AP on the accomodation block, this seems a waste and we will probnably run cable from an AP installed on the staff flats instead.

Day 4: David J should be joining me today and we will be meeting with the farmers in the conservancy for a braai. I hope that we can raise the issue of what we are building and get people excited. Just before leaving yesterday I got everything up: I can ping all the other APs and can get out onto the net. I'll be checking this again remotely to see if I can get from USAid, to the clinic and out.

== February 16, 2005, Meshing ==

I've had a busy few days here in Peables Valley:

Day 1: Setup a linksys on the roof of the clinic. Found that we really can't see Petra from here or anywhere actually, Petra is a nice high point but all buildings are hidden behind a large rock. We installed one at a house belonging to consultants for USAid. This is a good site as we can see the staff flats from there but none of the other buildings. The problem with this is we now need to find a good spot at the clinic so that we can see USAid without using two APs at the clinic.

I visited the school, unfortunately Mr Sihlabela is off ill until March. I met with the principal and two other teachers and have agreed to visit on Friday with David. The school can see USAid but we still need to confirm the signal strength.

In discussions with various people I realised that lightning is going to be a serious problem. With all the equipment on an AP costing about R2,000 it can cripple a network if they have a serious strike.

Day 2: A frustrating day trying to get Kismet working. This involved creating a patched kernel to allow the orinoco driver to go into Monitor mode. Finding, downloading and compiling takes a long time. I did manage to get onto the clinic roof and confirm that we couldn't see a signal from USAid. We did get a signal from the staff flats.

In discussing uses for the network we had some new ideas:

* Getting house ridden patients a computer to get them communicating and getting outside virtually.
* Having the same patient do data capturing to bolster his income
* We also talked about using SMS and cellphones for compliance. Setting alarms for medicine taking. SMS messages that require a reply to check compliance. Notifying support group buddies about people not replying to SMS notification so that they can check that they're OK.

Day 3: Kismet is working! Not all the information is that useful for what I need to do. Met the clinic staff today to try and explain what we're doing. Today I'm checking signal strength from the school, its seems however that USAid is offline.

== February 11, 2005, Equipment got ==

We now have the equipment for the FMFI Wireless project in Mpumalanga. We have 10 Linksys wireless AP which we're firmware upgrading. The cards are in a nice heavy duty all weather box. A picture would be great :). All the boxes are being moded to do power over ethernet which makes hte whole installation clean and simple. Currently it looks like costs are around R2,000 a node.

I'm lugging the lot down to White River this weekend and will erect 3 of the nodes. Mainly to test equipment and get a working initial network. The other nodes will be setup by the community, following the Onno Purbo style of network deployment.

Mpumulanga Mesh

2006-01-04T16:24:09Z

Kilos: /* September 22, 2005, WiFi in the bush or the plot */

== Location ==

White River is a medium sized town about 20 minutes north of Nelspruit, the capital of Mpumalanga Province. Peables Valley and the Masoi Tribal land is located 20 minutes to the North East of White River along the road leading to the Kruger National Parks Numbi gate.

The area is hilly with some large granite outcrops. The Peables Valley stretches from the ACTS clinic and divides the commercial farms from the Masoi area. Commercial farming in the broader area is predominately timber but fortunately along the valley there is no timber farming (this would pose a connectivity problem and impact line of sight requirements). The farmers as a community are already well connected (organisationally not in terms of Internet connectivity) with commando like structures in place because of crime.

The ACTS clinic is located at the beginning of the Valley. ACTS stands for AIDS Care Training and Support Clinic. They provide medical services to AIDS patients, councilling, testing and Anti-retroviral (ARV) treatment. The clinic has gained a reputation within the community with many people coming from outside of the Masoyi area for treatment. They are have been selected for managing ARV roleout because of their well developed councilling, testing and support group networks. Currently they have about 200 people on ARVs with this figure likely to grow to over 600. These treatements are being monitored by researchers at WITS University.

The Masoyi area runs along the right hand side of the valley. We identified approximately 10 schools, with two identified as being high schools with computer facilities. The project team has good links to a teacher in one of these schools who is in charge of the computer lab. In the area there is also a teachers training centre, government hospital and various government clinics in the area. The ACTS clinic runs a hospice close to one of the Government clinics.

== Situation in the Community ==

The community is underserviced. Most roads remain unpaved with the main road having been rebuilt after the floods of 2000. Electricity is available within the community.
The community is poor and has been hugely impacted by AIDS. Losing salaried member of households through AIDS has a bi impact on extended families. There is also the associated superstition and secretiveness around AIDS which does not help improve the situation.

== ACTS clinic ==

The clinic is a non-profit organisation established to provide AIDS care in the Masoyi area. It was initially sponsored by Glaxo Smithcline. The clinic has two doctors, an onsite hospice, training centre and accomodation for people on training courses.

A number of staff have been trained to provide pre-test and post-test councilling. This leaves the doctors free to focus on the medical aspects of treatment. The clinic operates in many ways like a private doctors practice. They charge consultation fees and patients on medical aid are charged accordingly. They however usually waive all fees as soon as it is established that a patient is suffering from AIDS. The clinic is relatively sopphisticated in their use of computers: they run practice management software, are connected to the Internet via Vsat for their research with WITS. They also have some custom MS Access based applications written internally to track patient statistics.

== Proposed Solution ==

Deploy a mesh network within the Peables Valley, run training courses to transfer skills on mesh setup and installation, work together with the clinic staff using Free Attitude Interviews (FAI) to discover applications and uses that work for the staff.

== What problem is being addressed ==

The main thrust is to connect the clinic to its community hospice and thus allow them to extend their computer facilities to the hospice (practise management software and statistics gathering). This is most easily achieved through a wireless network and more specifically a mesh because of the terrain.

A mesh network requires a number of nodes in areas not owned by the clinic but that are part of the commuity: schools and farmers. The main thrust of the research question is to implement the network in such a way that the firstly the clinic and secondly the community have taken ownership of the network. That they have created systems that ensure that the infrastructure is maintained and expanded by the users of the network.

== Technology Explained ==

A wireless network involves radios and arials. The radios broadcast and receive signals which are boosted and directed by the arials. Anyone with a radio can access the network. The spectrum used for Wifi required line-of-sight for connectivity. The routes between sites are also hard coded or manually adjusted in each device. This makes it technically difficult on two levels. Firstly, you need a deaper understanding or the radio spectrum and the operation of radio wave and secondly, configuration of the equipment requires a higher level of skill.

A mesh network uses the same infrastructure: aerials and radios. But at the network level it operated differently. The network simply requires that each node can see at least one other node (ie it can be part of the network) and that each node can send trafic to any node on the network (ie there are no islands which are not connected to the whole). In a mesh network this problem is solved at the software level. As long as your node can see another node it will be able to determine the routes to follow. The also allows for a level of self healing and thus less maintenance. If for example a truck parks in from of the node or a tree grows up over time and block the signal to another node then as long as the node can see an alternate node it can route traffic via this new path. On a conventional wireless network this would need to be manually configured.

The choice of mesh in the Peables Valley was made for these reasons:
Hilly terrain that requires a number of hops to reach the destination
Low skilled network operators
Changing conditions in the environment. Nodes that disappear through neglect, theft, obstruction.

== Social Challenges ==

There are a number of social challenges:

Firstly, for the the network to operate to serivice firstly the clinic and secondly the community it requires the cooperations of teachers in schools and of farmers. They all have there own agenda's there own perceptions of their expected level of involvment and their expectation of how aid is given to them.

In the school we are concerned about a hand-out mentality that will not see the school working hard to be involved in the extension of the mesh but simply being involved as long as it takes to link the school to the Internet. There is also the risk of our contact at the school wanting to be seen as being in charge and not wanting to work together with schools in the community.

To addess that we are looking at bringing the school pupils into the process from the beginning and teaching them how to install and configure equipment.

Secondly, with the farmers we are confident that it will be easy to sell them the concept of Internet connectivity. However, for the network to work for them will require that they connect to schools in the Masoyi area. We are not certain about the realtionship between these two groups. Considering the crime levels there is the risk that there is not a good level of trust.

Our strategy is to involve people from both groups during training workshops. Which at the very least would allow realtionships to be established.

Lastly, this is not the primary focus of the ACTS clinic so there will always be the risk that people are redeployed.

However, our main contact in the clinic is an electrical engineer by profession and the clinic itself has proved that they are a teaching organisation (their previous garder now runs the reception).

== Technical Challenges ==

Mesh networks are a new phenomena with the software sometimes not yet at the level required for the mesh to operate well. There is the risk that in this project we will discover the limitations of the technology and have to spend time compensating for that.

Some of the endpoint nodes we have identified require many hops. This requires many nodes. This is both a social and technical challenge. Social in that the project needs to bring each of those players on board and technical in that each of those nodes needs to be built, deployed and maintained.

There is also the risk of theft. The node equipment has very little commercial resale value in the community, although there seems to be wifi operating in the Nelspruit, White River area. However, that never seems to be a consideration of petty thieves. Hopefully deploying the equipment in established locations: schools, shops, private homes and not simply in the open will help secure the equipment.

== Equipment Ownership ==

As the objective is to create a community based network where the network is seen as a community asset so therefore some of the equipment at key nodes should belong to the community. Official ownership will be with the ACTS clinic until such time as a more formal structure for ownership of key mesh equipment can be established.

As the mesh grows individual node owners will own their own equipment. So a farmer or school will be the owner of that equipment and it will form part of the mesh. It is hoped that farmers will partner with institutions such as schools in which case the partners will define ownership relationships.

The project does not envision supplying any equipment to farmers unless they are located such that having equipment on their farm is critical to creating the mesh. In such as case we would look at funding that node if the project has to but the project will still attempt to have the farmer install his/her own equipment.

== Intellectual Property ==

The project will release all work under a suitable Open Source license. This work includes documentation and results of the research.

The project will not be developing any independent software but will be using other freely available mesh software. In the case that software is improved or modified it will be released under the license of the original software project to ensure that it can be included in future releases of that software.

== Sustainability ==

A key component to sustainability will be involvement of the farmers, Bible colleges, etc within the Peables Valley. The project will draw in the farmers for the following reasons: 1) they are a source of skills, 2) they have finances to pay for Internet connectivity and 3) that once they become users they are likely to become dependent on the mesh and thus ensure its ongoing success.

Part of the program will be to educate participants from the start so that they can extend the reach of the mesh. Included will be education of pupils from the partner schools. This education is designed to ensure that enough skills are available in the valley to repair nodes, setup new nodes, manage the mesh and train others.

A key component to the sustainability is that the project manager as the ACTS clinic is a qualified electrical engineer. We are therefore confident that it will not be difficult to educate him on the workings of the mesh network. He has already demonstrated his excitement and commitment to the project by spending a Saturday with the project leaders evaluating high sites. He is involved in training staff and is extremely practical so will be invaluable in erecting high sites.

== Pros and Cons of the system ==

First considering some positive aspects of the mesh. Firstly the clinic is already using IT infrastructure in the following areas: ARV monitoring, clinic management and accounts. Farmer, bible colleges, etc in the community already use the Internet for email etc but usually at great cost because of the limited choice of commectivity options. The partner schools already has a lab that has in the past been connected to the Internet. So there is already a body of people who have demonstrated the willingness or need to use the Internet who we feel would be willing the use a mesh if it provide always on and lower Internet connectivity costs.

The potential problems we see are the following. There is the risk that the effort to manage or be part of the mesh may be more expensive then direct connection especially in the case of the lack of good neighbourliness from any mesh participant. The clinic, although they currently use IT extensively, may in fact not need to extend that usage beyond the main clinic. The risk with the schools we feel is that there is a general hand-out mentality and that there will not be the will to learn, extend the network or integrate this into the curriculum. Another large risk is the sustainability of the network not from the mesh side but from the side of financing the hop onto the Internet itself.

== Backhaul Connectivity ==

The connectivity to ACTS is provided via Telkom VSAT. ACTS uses the connection as part of their involvement in ARV roleout for the Right To Care group. They have an Internet based application for capturing details of patients for monitoring and evaluating patients receiving ARVs

== Network Topology ==

[[Image:Acts meshnet.jpg]]

== News Flashes ==

== September 22, 2005, WiFi in the bush or the plot ==

Duane visited the IDRC funded workshop for WiFi in Africa. Sorry don't know what the real project name is. Sat in on the session on regulation, the Department of Communications delegates decided that this would be a good time to leave. Nice when you know you can't actually stand the heat.

Had a look at their cantenna based access-point liming over about 5km. With a Linksys strapped to a tree with... red tape... man we can't get away from red tape in this industry.

Most surprising was plot.net a local WISP that delivers Internet to about 100 customers and nobody new that they existed before booking the venue. They do long haul links to ADSL connections in Pretoria. Quite an innoative solution to high cost access. I want to explore that possibility in Peebles Valley.

== October 06, 2005 Wikipedia on the mesh ==

David and I visited the Peebles Mesh this week for two days and here is
a quick synopsis of events:

- We installed a firewall. This has software which should allow us to
control and cap bandwidth and it separates us from the clinic.
- We installed a local copy of Wikipedia. Still some bugs but very fast
- We can now access the site remotely

Big SURPRISE

Our cantennae was still operating! We did a data transfer from the
wireless box to ourselves. 3 hops I think at 192kB/s

First farmer online

We connected the chairman of the local farmers group to the Internet.
It was lovely we just watched and took notes. The farmers younger
brother had returned from the UK with a new laptop. We got that
connected. The first thing he asked is if he could download music - ho
hum :)

The sister of the farmer was also visiting and started giving her mother
a sales pitch about how they could talk to each other using skype for
free.

Was lovely to watch and we had boere kos but arrived a bit late for
lunch. We will ensure that doesn't happen again.

== July 06, 2005, Realisation of a mesh vision ==

Today we had a film crew filming the installation of a mesh node. It was great fun but they did waste our time a bit. Technically this is what we got done:

* Installed the node on Agnus' house permanently. Lassy did all this work
* Put a 3m pole at the Hospice to see if we can get over the ridge
* Upgraded AGNUS, HOSPICE and SIKILE to OpenWrt
* The clinic is cabled to various buildings so we will be able to recover one node and just run a cable from the FLATS node to the VSAT.

We had a 7ms delay between AGNUS and ACTS_VSAT which is a route that passes through all present nodes. VoIP is now truely achievable. Wonderful performance compared to WDS mode. Throw out WDS wherever you see it its just not worth the effort. It is honestly more simple to setup OLSR. Glad we've learnt that and can move on.

We still have the following technical hurdles to overcome. The default route keeps disappearing. We need to install a proper firewall. Once that is done we can move onto the community adoption.

The day was full of some lovely experiences of the potential of what we are doing.

Once we had AGNUS up we setup Dave's laptop and had Agnus' daughter and a neighbour sit at the computer. Dave opened Google. They didn't know what to do. We asked them what information they wanted to know. Stuck again. "Who is your favourite singer?" - Alicia Keys - "OK type that in the search box, then click on search" - Shouts of glee as the search results return. "Now click here". Off they went to Alecia Keys home site and disappeared for about 10 minutes. Does that count as training? The two of them were sitting inside quite a dark house, they sat together on a sofa and the laptop screen glowed in the semi-dark with their face highlighted. This exact image was the vision I had for this project. So that made my day.

I did a quick training course in the dirt. Explaining what the different aerials did, how it all fitted together. And of course how to use a high-gain antenna as a fish braai. Lassy provided Swati translation as soon as there was any confusion.

Now off to the school to film students working on computers. They wanted to interview the teacher, who was a standing in for Mr Sihlabela who we usualy work with. "What will you use the Internet for at your school", to which he replied, "I don't know". David did a quick exercise of taking the teacher, a history teacher, to Google. They Googled for "Shaka Zulu" and ended up at a very good site on the subject. "What will you use the Internet for at your school", and we got a 5 minute reply. Does that count as training?

What worked best about this trip was having a very focused objective - get the mesh network working. We didn't care about the firewall, the billing, shapping, etc. And we got it done. The next trips will be similarly technically focussed.

== July 05,2005 Moving on to OLSR ==

I left Peebles Valley at the end of May and this is the first return since then. David and I are migrating all the Linksys boxes from Sveasoft to OpenWrt, specifically the builds produced by Freifunk which has a nice web interface. Lassy has joined us again and is helping us move the equipment around.

The task involves loading the Freifunk firmware onto the box. This requires local connectivity. We still had connection problem until we discovered the ghosts of a WDS past. Alot of WDS settings were still on each of the boxes. We've now had to go and remove those especially the Lazy WDS mode settings which keep establishing bridges. OLSR looks like the right solution. Its the same amount of work as WDS setup but you get real routes, ones that you see and can traceroute through so you can actually see exactly how packets are being routed on the network. I'm much much happier. Yesterday we got USAID, ACTS_VSAT and ACTS_FLATS converted. Today we are in the field with a film crew and will migrate: AGNUS house, SIKILE_HIGH and FARM_COBUS. If we can get traffic from either Agnus' house or Cobus' farm then we know that the protocol is good, both these points would have to route through. SIKILE, USAID, ACTS_FLATS then ACTS_VSAT. WDS could never do that and if we can get this working then the mesh is good and we can move onto the next challenging problem.

At the last conservancy meeting at which ACTS clinic was present they mentioned the Mesh but all the farmers were wondering when exactly anything would happen. Hopefully we have a working system before we leave.

We also spoke to Frans Benz whose property is below USAID and he is still interested.

Of the nodes that we have observed all were powered up except ACTS_VSAT this was good as it means that people are leaving the equipment to do its job. THe VSAT was down because the plug is just too close to a useful double adapter.

We have brought 300m of CAT5 cable which the clinic will use to run cable from the VSat to the Flat so we can eliminate one node and use it elsewhere. This clinic has arranged conduit and pulling of the cables.

== February 19, 2005, Lessons learned from week long meshing ==

Lessons learnt

* Test test test: test devices in a known controlled environment. The box couldn't connect and we weren't sure exactly why.
* Use your own stuff: don't use other peoples stuff. We tried to use the alarm companies mast, it was rubbish and about to fall down. But it could also endanger our equipment when the alarm company removes there antennae.
* Equipment: cover for your laptop so you can see the screen. Backpack/fishing jacket also a head- mounted display wouldn't hurt (to monitor the wireless network). Rifle-mounted antennae with sight. Tri-pod for temporary mounting of equipment. Ladders are a problem you need a long extension ladder about 6m.
* Windows Sucks: we had major packet drop yet on Linux the network pings work perfectly. Either Windows has a simple and incompetant network layer or it puts so much rubbish on the network that it sucks up all bandwidth. Why do people use this rubbish!
* Testing protocol: It would be usefull to have a set standard of how you tackle problem. Many time you go down the wrong route. Simple idea: mount antennae with laptop and get signal strengths right. Then connect box browse to the box over the wire and check for links. Lastly connect to the box as a wireless client.

Observations on the first stage

The object of this exercise was for David and I to learn how to setup the equipment before involving the community. This objective has been met: the mesh functions well, we can monitor it and we can use it from any node.
Successes

We created a 4 node mesh that works and can connect to the Internet. Although we had issues these were just teething problem for the technicians and the hardware is really box-drop ready. This is really positive for a non-technical mesh community.

We met with the farmers and they now know what we are doing which give us easier access to their properties. The USAid couple were very helpful, very keen and are well known and liked in the community. We hope that this relationship and them being early users will help increase adoption within the farming community.

We validated that we can connect to the school through the USAid node. Although our contact at the school was on sick leave the principle made arrangements for another teacher to stay after school on Friday for almost 4 hours while we attempted to setup their node. We also noted the school now has a 15 seat computer lab.

The ACTS clinic staff were quite excited especially those that are volunteers from overseas. A number of ideas for the use of the network were put forward by the staff. These included using house bound AIDS patients to data capture for the clinic or simply to create new virtual relationships. Also suggested was using instant messaging as a form of anonymous counciling to allow school pupils to speak openly about AIDS.
Issues noted

Support! We have already got our first support call from people who use operating system that know better then you what they want to do. This is a source of potential problems as people will phone the clinic and overbuden an already busy staff. We need to investigate how the community can provide that support or busget to pay for such support.

Lightning! This is going to be a serious problem, there are solutions such as mast spikes that we need to install.

Power downs. The clinic powers off most of their equipment at night thus taking the gateway down. We need to look at way to keep this up. The conection also require human intervention and we need to investigate automation of this taks.

Network separation. The mesh is currently on the clinic network. The clinic does deal with sensitive data but also for security and management issues we need to seperate the neworks from each other.

Usage monitoring, charging. We need to begin monitoring and controlling usage so that we can explore charging models in the future.

Windows... it puts junk on the network. We need to look at simple firewall rules on the nodes to drop NetBEUI junk from the network.
Next steps

We will return to the site in a months time. At this time we wish to: separate the networks, install the school node, install a monitoring and access control system and announce a training course for the following month.

We will separate the networks by installing a new network card on the firewall. Most probably we will use NoCatAuth to control access to the network but need to investigate alternatives.

Other things to investigate are models for charging for network usage. Currently our strategy is to have farmers cross-subsidise the schools connectivity. A problem with this however is that other forms of connectivity are becoming relatively cheap (3G, etc) so this still needs to be reasonable.

== February 19, 2005, Too much sun for a geek ==

Day 4: Had steak at the conservancy meeting. Talked a little about the mesh - nobody understood what I was tgalking about... But getting cheap Internet sounded cool to them. The farmers have serious problem with Telk^h^h^h^h connectivity, phones, lightning, macadamia thieves, water, etc.

Day 5: Dave J works for a big parastatal like company which means he always comes late cause someone wants him to do something (he tells me he was fighting Jhb traffic to get more Linksys boxes. Mainly spent the morning getting ntop (a great network monitoring tool working) and got EtherApe (nice graphical monitoring tool) working. These are quite good for seeing how badly Windows abuses network resources.

Spent the afternoon with David at Sikhile High. Was pretty fruitless we couldn't work out if it was the box, antennae, or sun that was messing us around.

Day 6: Installed the USAid node properly. Took a long time and got really sunburned. Note to self need a ladder, suntan lotion, umbrella and LOTS of water. Installed a 90deg patch panel. We had major problems getting links to the clinic which was frustrating.

== February 17, 2005, More meshing ==

Day 3 cont...: Got USAid online, had been switched off not blown up by lightning. Phew. Installed a second mesh point which proved not to be needed. Worked out how to add parameters to the Kismet display, only worked out later that the signal strength bar graph is completely arbitrary. Will need to check all that again today. Installed an AP on the accomodation block, this seems a waste and we will probnably run cable from an AP installed on the staff flats instead.

Day 4: David J should be joining me today and we will be meeting with the farmers in the conservancy for a braai. I hope that we can raise the issue of what we are building and get people excited. Just before leaving yesterday I got everything up: I can ping all the other APs and can get out onto the net. I'll be checking this again remotely to see if I can get from USAid, to the clinic and out.

== February 16, 2005, Meshing ==

I've had a busy few days here in Peables Valley:

Day 1: Setup a linksys on the roof of the clinic. Found that we really can't see Petra from here or anywhere actually, Petra is a nice high point but all buildings are hidden behind a large rock. We installed one at a house belonging to consultants for USAid. This is a good site as we can see the staff flats from there but none of the other buildings. The problem with this is we now need to find a good spot at the clinic so that we can see USAid without using two APs at the clinic.

I visited the school, unfortunately Mr Sihlabela is off ill until March. I met with the principal and two other teachers and have agreed to visit on Friday with David. The school can see USAid but we still need to confirm the signal strength.

In discussions with various people I realised that lightning is going to be a serious problem. With all the equipment on an AP costing about R2,000 it can cripple a network if they have a serious strike.

Day 2: A frustrating day trying to get Kismet working. This involved creating a patched kernel to allow the orinoco driver to go into Monitor mode. Finding, downloading and compiling takes a long time. I did manage to get onto the clinic roof and confirm that we couldn't see a signal from USAid. We did get a signal from the staff flats.

In discussing uses for the network we had some new ideas:

* Getting house ridden patients a computer to get them communicating and getting outside virtually.
* Having the same patient do data capturing to bolster his income
* We also talked about using SMS and cellphones for compliance. Setting alarms for medicine taking. SMS messages that require a reply to check compliance. Notifying support group buddies about people not replying to SMS notification so that they can check that they're OK.

Day 3: Kismet is working! Not all the information is that useful for what I need to do. Met the clinic staff today to try and explain what we're doing. Today I'm checking signal strength from the school, its seems however that USAid is offline.

== February 11, 2005, Equipment got ==

We now have the equipment for the FMFI Wireless project in Mpumalanga. We have 10 Linksys wireless AP which we're firmware upgrading. The cards are in a nice heavy duty all weather box. A picture would be great :). All the boxes are being moded to do power over ethernet which makes hte whole installation clean and simple. Currently it looks like costs are around R2,000 a node.

I'm lugging the lot down to White River this weekend and will erect 3 of the nodes. Mainly to test equipment and get a working initial network. The other nodes will be setup by the community, following the Onno Purbo style of network deployment.

Mpumulanga Mesh

2006-01-04T16:20:39Z

Kilos: /* July 06, 2005, Realisation of a mesh vision */

== Location ==

White River is a medium sized town about 20 minutes north of Nelspruit, the capital of Mpumalanga Province. Peables Valley and the Masoi Tribal land is located 20 minutes to the North East of White River along the road leading to the Kruger National Parks Numbi gate.

The area is hilly with some large granite outcrops. The Peables Valley stretches from the ACTS clinic and divides the commercial farms from the Masoi area. Commercial farming in the broader area is predominately timber but fortunately along the valley there is no timber farming (this would pose a connectivity problem and impact line of sight requirements). The farmers as a community are already well connected (organisationally not in terms of Internet connectivity) with commando like structures in place because of crime.

The ACTS clinic is located at the beginning of the Valley. ACTS stands for AIDS Care Training and Support Clinic. They provide medical services to AIDS patients, councilling, testing and Anti-retroviral (ARV) treatment. The clinic has gained a reputation within the community with many people coming from outside of the Masoyi area for treatment. They are have been selected for managing ARV roleout because of their well developed councilling, testing and support group networks. Currently they have about 200 people on ARVs with this figure likely to grow to over 600. These treatements are being monitored by researchers at WITS University.

The Masoyi area runs along the right hand side of the valley. We identified approximately 10 schools, with two identified as being high schools with computer facilities. The project team has good links to a teacher in one of these schools who is in charge of the computer lab. In the area there is also a teachers training centre, government hospital and various government clinics in the area. The ACTS clinic runs a hospice close to one of the Government clinics.

== Situation in the Community ==

The community is underserviced. Most roads remain unpaved with the main road having been rebuilt after the floods of 2000. Electricity is available within the community.
The community is poor and has been hugely impacted by AIDS. Losing salaried member of households through AIDS has a bi impact on extended families. There is also the associated superstition and secretiveness around AIDS which does not help improve the situation.

== ACTS clinic ==

The clinic is a non-profit organisation established to provide AIDS care in the Masoyi area. It was initially sponsored by Glaxo Smithcline. The clinic has two doctors, an onsite hospice, training centre and accomodation for people on training courses.

A number of staff have been trained to provide pre-test and post-test councilling. This leaves the doctors free to focus on the medical aspects of treatment. The clinic operates in many ways like a private doctors practice. They charge consultation fees and patients on medical aid are charged accordingly. They however usually waive all fees as soon as it is established that a patient is suffering from AIDS. The clinic is relatively sopphisticated in their use of computers: they run practice management software, are connected to the Internet via Vsat for their research with WITS. They also have some custom MS Access based applications written internally to track patient statistics.

== Proposed Solution ==

Deploy a mesh network within the Peables Valley, run training courses to transfer skills on mesh setup and installation, work together with the clinic staff using Free Attitude Interviews (FAI) to discover applications and uses that work for the staff.

== What problem is being addressed ==

The main thrust is to connect the clinic to its community hospice and thus allow them to extend their computer facilities to the hospice (practise management software and statistics gathering). This is most easily achieved through a wireless network and more specifically a mesh because of the terrain.

A mesh network requires a number of nodes in areas not owned by the clinic but that are part of the commuity: schools and farmers. The main thrust of the research question is to implement the network in such a way that the firstly the clinic and secondly the community have taken ownership of the network. That they have created systems that ensure that the infrastructure is maintained and expanded by the users of the network.

== Technology Explained ==

A wireless network involves radios and arials. The radios broadcast and receive signals which are boosted and directed by the arials. Anyone with a radio can access the network. The spectrum used for Wifi required line-of-sight for connectivity. The routes between sites are also hard coded or manually adjusted in each device. This makes it technically difficult on two levels. Firstly, you need a deaper understanding or the radio spectrum and the operation of radio wave and secondly, configuration of the equipment requires a higher level of skill.

A mesh network uses the same infrastructure: aerials and radios. But at the network level it operated differently. The network simply requires that each node can see at least one other node (ie it can be part of the network) and that each node can send trafic to any node on the network (ie there are no islands which are not connected to the whole). In a mesh network this problem is solved at the software level. As long as your node can see another node it will be able to determine the routes to follow. The also allows for a level of self healing and thus less maintenance. If for example a truck parks in from of the node or a tree grows up over time and block the signal to another node then as long as the node can see an alternate node it can route traffic via this new path. On a conventional wireless network this would need to be manually configured.

The choice of mesh in the Peables Valley was made for these reasons:
Hilly terrain that requires a number of hops to reach the destination
Low skilled network operators
Changing conditions in the environment. Nodes that disappear through neglect, theft, obstruction.

== Social Challenges ==

There are a number of social challenges:

Firstly, for the the network to operate to serivice firstly the clinic and secondly the community it requires the cooperations of teachers in schools and of farmers. They all have there own agenda's there own perceptions of their expected level of involvment and their expectation of how aid is given to them.

In the school we are concerned about a hand-out mentality that will not see the school working hard to be involved in the extension of the mesh but simply being involved as long as it takes to link the school to the Internet. There is also the risk of our contact at the school wanting to be seen as being in charge and not wanting to work together with schools in the community.

To addess that we are looking at bringing the school pupils into the process from the beginning and teaching them how to install and configure equipment.

Secondly, with the farmers we are confident that it will be easy to sell them the concept of Internet connectivity. However, for the network to work for them will require that they connect to schools in the Masoyi area. We are not certain about the realtionship between these two groups. Considering the crime levels there is the risk that there is not a good level of trust.

Our strategy is to involve people from both groups during training workshops. Which at the very least would allow realtionships to be established.

Lastly, this is not the primary focus of the ACTS clinic so there will always be the risk that people are redeployed.

However, our main contact in the clinic is an electrical engineer by profession and the clinic itself has proved that they are a teaching organisation (their previous garder now runs the reception).

== Technical Challenges ==

Mesh networks are a new phenomena with the software sometimes not yet at the level required for the mesh to operate well. There is the risk that in this project we will discover the limitations of the technology and have to spend time compensating for that.

Some of the endpoint nodes we have identified require many hops. This requires many nodes. This is both a social and technical challenge. Social in that the project needs to bring each of those players on board and technical in that each of those nodes needs to be built, deployed and maintained.

There is also the risk of theft. The node equipment has very little commercial resale value in the community, although there seems to be wifi operating in the Nelspruit, White River area. However, that never seems to be a consideration of petty thieves. Hopefully deploying the equipment in established locations: schools, shops, private homes and not simply in the open will help secure the equipment.

== Equipment Ownership ==

As the objective is to create a community based network where the network is seen as a community asset so therefore some of the equipment at key nodes should belong to the community. Official ownership will be with the ACTS clinic until such time as a more formal structure for ownership of key mesh equipment can be established.

As the mesh grows individual node owners will own their own equipment. So a farmer or school will be the owner of that equipment and it will form part of the mesh. It is hoped that farmers will partner with institutions such as schools in which case the partners will define ownership relationships.

The project does not envision supplying any equipment to farmers unless they are located such that having equipment on their farm is critical to creating the mesh. In such as case we would look at funding that node if the project has to but the project will still attempt to have the farmer install his/her own equipment.

== Intellectual Property ==

The project will release all work under a suitable Open Source license. This work includes documentation and results of the research.

The project will not be developing any independent software but will be using other freely available mesh software. In the case that software is improved or modified it will be released under the license of the original software project to ensure that it can be included in future releases of that software.

== Sustainability ==

A key component to sustainability will be involvement of the farmers, Bible colleges, etc within the Peables Valley. The project will draw in the farmers for the following reasons: 1) they are a source of skills, 2) they have finances to pay for Internet connectivity and 3) that once they become users they are likely to become dependent on the mesh and thus ensure its ongoing success.

Part of the program will be to educate participants from the start so that they can extend the reach of the mesh. Included will be education of pupils from the partner schools. This education is designed to ensure that enough skills are available in the valley to repair nodes, setup new nodes, manage the mesh and train others.

A key component to the sustainability is that the project manager as the ACTS clinic is a qualified electrical engineer. We are therefore confident that it will not be difficult to educate him on the workings of the mesh network. He has already demonstrated his excitement and commitment to the project by spending a Saturday with the project leaders evaluating high sites. He is involved in training staff and is extremely practical so will be invaluable in erecting high sites.

== Pros and Cons of the system ==

First considering some positive aspects of the mesh. Firstly the clinic is already using IT infrastructure in the following areas: ARV monitoring, clinic management and accounts. Farmer, bible colleges, etc in the community already use the Internet for email etc but usually at great cost because of the limited choice of commectivity options. The partner schools already has a lab that has in the past been connected to the Internet. So there is already a body of people who have demonstrated the willingness or need to use the Internet who we feel would be willing the use a mesh if it provide always on and lower Internet connectivity costs.

The potential problems we see are the following. There is the risk that the effort to manage or be part of the mesh may be more expensive then direct connection especially in the case of the lack of good neighbourliness from any mesh participant. The clinic, although they currently use IT extensively, may in fact not need to extend that usage beyond the main clinic. The risk with the schools we feel is that there is a general hand-out mentality and that there will not be the will to learn, extend the network or integrate this into the curriculum. Another large risk is the sustainability of the network not from the mesh side but from the side of financing the hop onto the Internet itself.

== Backhaul Connectivity ==

The connectivity to ACTS is provided via Telkom VSAT. ACTS uses the connection as part of their involvement in ARV roleout for the Right To Care group. They have an Internet based application for capturing details of patients for monitoring and evaluating patients receiving ARVs

== Network Topology ==

[[Image:Acts meshnet.jpg]]

== News Flashes ==

== September 22, 2005, WiFi in the bush or the plot ==

Duane visited the IDRC funded workshop for WiFi in Africa. Sorry don't knwo what the real project name is. Sat in on the session on regulation, the Department of Communications delegates decided that this would be a good time to leave. Nice when you know you can't actually stand the heat.

Had a look at their cantenna based access-point liming over about 5km. With a Linksys strapped to a tree with... red tape... man we can't get away from red tape in this industry.

Most surprising was plot.net a local WISP that delivers Internet to about 100 customers and nobody new that they existed before booking the venue. They do long haul links to ADSL connections in Pretoria. Quite an innoative solution to high cost access. I want to explore that possibility in Peebles Valley.

== October 06, 2005 Wikipedia on the mesh ==

David and I visited the Peebles Mesh this week for two days and here is
a quick synopsis of events:

- We installed a firewall. This has software which should allow us to
control and cap bandwidth and it separates us from the clinic.
- We installed a local copy of Wikipedia. Still some bugs but very fast
- We can now access the site remotely

Big SURPRISE

Our cantennae was still operating! We did a data transfer from the
wireless box to ourselves. 3 hops I think at 192kB/s

First farmer online

We connected the chairman of the local farmers group to the Internet.
It was lovely we just watched and took notes. The farmers younger
brother had returned from the UK with a new laptop. We got that
connected. The first thing he asked is if he could download music - ho
hum :)

The sister of the farmer was also visiting and started giving her mother
a sales pitch about how they could talk to each other using skype for
free.

Was lovely to watch and we had boere kos but arrived a bit late for
lunch. We will ensure that doesn't happen again.

== July 06, 2005, Realisation of a mesh vision ==

Today we had a film crew filming the installation of a mesh node. It was great fun but they did waste our time a bit. Technically this is what we got done:

* Installed the node on Agnus' house permanently. Lassy did all this work
* Put a 3m pole at the Hospice to see if we can get over the ridge
* Upgraded AGNUS, HOSPICE and SIKILE to OpenWrt
* The clinic is cabled to various buildings so we will be able to recover one node and just run a cable from the FLATS node to the VSAT.

We had a 7ms delay between AGNUS and ACTS_VSAT which is a route that passes through all present nodes. VoIP is now truely achievable. Wonderful performance compared to WDS mode. Throw out WDS wherever you see it its just not worth the effort. It is honestly more simple to setup OLSR. Glad we've learnt that and can move on.

We still have the following technical hurdles to overcome. The default route keeps disappearing. We need to install a proper firewall. Once that is done we can move onto the community adoption.

The day was full of some lovely experiences of the potential of what we are doing.

Once we had AGNUS up we setup Dave's laptop and had Agnus' daughter and a neighbour sit at the computer. Dave opened Google. They didn't know what to do. We asked them what information they wanted to know. Stuck again. "Who is your favourite singer?" - Alicia Keys - "OK type that in the search box, then click on search" - Shouts of glee as the search results return. "Now click here". Off they went to Alecia Keys home site and disappeared for about 10 minutes. Does that count as training? The two of them were sitting inside quite a dark house, they sat together on a sofa and the laptop screen glowed in the semi-dark with their face highlighted. This exact image was the vision I had for this project. So that made my day.

I did a quick training course in the dirt. Explaining what the different aerials did, how it all fitted together. And of course how to use a high-gain antenna as a fish braai. Lassy provided Swati translation as soon as there was any confusion.

Now off to the school to film students working on computers. They wanted to interview the teacher, who was a standing in for Mr Sihlabela who we usualy work with. "What will you use the Internet for at your school", to which he replied, "I don't know". David did a quick exercise of taking the teacher, a history teacher, to Google. They Googled for "Shaka Zulu" and ended up at a very good site on the subject. "What will you use the Internet for at your school", and we got a 5 minute reply. Does that count as training?

What worked best about this trip was having a very focused objective - get the mesh network working. We didn't care about the firewall, the billing, shapping, etc. And we got it done. The next trips will be similarly technically focussed.

== July 05,2005 Moving on to OLSR ==

I left Peebles Valley at the end of May and this is the first return since then. David and I are migrating all the Linksys boxes from Sveasoft to OpenWrt, specifically the builds produced by Freifunk which has a nice web interface. Lassy has joined us again and is helping us move the equipment around.

The task involves loading the Freifunk firmware onto the box. This requires local connectivity. We still had connection problem until we discovered the ghosts of a WDS past. Alot of WDS settings were still on each of the boxes. We've now had to go and remove those especially the Lazy WDS mode settings which keep establishing bridges. OLSR looks like the right solution. Its the same amount of work as WDS setup but you get real routes, ones that you see and can traceroute through so you can actually see exactly how packets are being routed on the network. I'm much much happier. Yesterday we got USAID, ACTS_VSAT and ACTS_FLATS converted. Today we are in the field with a film crew and will migrate: AGNUS house, SIKILE_HIGH and FARM_COBUS. If we can get traffic from either Agnus' house or Cobus' farm then we know that the protocol is good, both these points would have to route through. SIKILE, USAID, ACTS_FLATS then ACTS_VSAT. WDS could never do that and if we can get this working then the mesh is good and we can move onto the next challenging problem.

At the last conservancy meeting at which ACTS clinic was present they mentioned the Mesh but all the farmers were wondering when exactly anything would happen. Hopefully we have a working system before we leave.

We also spoke to Frans Benz whose property is below USAID and he is still interested.

Of the nodes that we have observed all were powered up except ACTS_VSAT this was good as it means that people are leaving the equipment to do its job. THe VSAT was down because the plug is just too close to a useful double adapter.

We have brought 300m of CAT5 cable which the clinic will use to run cable from the VSat to the Flat so we can eliminate one node and use it elsewhere. This clinic has arranged conduit and pulling of the cables.

== February 19, 2005, Lessons learned from week long meshing ==

Lessons learnt

* Test test test: test devices in a known controlled environment. The box couldn't connect and we weren't sure exactly why.
* Use your own stuff: don't use other peoples stuff. We tried to use the alarm companies mast, it was rubbish and about to fall down. But it could also endanger our equipment when the alarm company removes there antennae.
* Equipment: cover for your laptop so you can see the screen. Backpack/fishing jacket also a head- mounted display wouldn't hurt (to monitor the wireless network). Rifle-mounted antennae with sight. Tri-pod for temporary mounting of equipment. Ladders are a problem you need a long extension ladder about 6m.
* Windows Sucks: we had major packet drop yet on Linux the network pings work perfectly. Either Windows has a simple and incompetant network layer or it puts so much rubbish on the network that it sucks up all bandwidth. Why do people use this rubbish!
* Testing protocol: It would be usefull to have a set standard of how you tackle problem. Many time you go down the wrong route. Simple idea: mount antennae with laptop and get signal strengths right. Then connect box browse to the box over the wire and check for links. Lastly connect to the box as a wireless client.

Observations on the first stage

The object of this exercise was for David and I to learn how to setup the equipment before involving the community. This objective has been met: the mesh functions well, we can monitor it and we can use it from any node.
Successes

We created a 4 node mesh that works and can connect to the Internet. Although we had issues these were just teething problem for the technicians and the hardware is really box-drop ready. This is really positive for a non-technical mesh community.

We met with the farmers and they now know what we are doing which give us easier access to their properties. The USAid couple were very helpful, very keen and are well known and liked in the community. We hope that this relationship and them being early users will help increase adoption within the farming community.

We validated that we can connect to the school through the USAid node. Although our contact at the school was on sick leave the principle made arrangements for another teacher to stay after school on Friday for almost 4 hours while we attempted to setup their node. We also noted the school now has a 15 seat computer lab.

The ACTS clinic staff were quite excited especially those that are volunteers from overseas. A number of ideas for the use of the network were put forward by the staff. These included using house bound AIDS patients to data capture for the clinic or simply to create new virtual relationships. Also suggested was using instant messaging as a form of anonymous counciling to allow school pupils to speak openly about AIDS.
Issues noted

Support! We have already got our first support call from people who use operating system that know better then you what they want to do. This is a source of potential problems as people will phone the clinic and overbuden an already busy staff. We need to investigate how the community can provide that support or busget to pay for such support.

Lightning! This is going to be a serious problem, there are solutions such as mast spikes that we need to install.

Power downs. The clinic powers off most of their equipment at night thus taking the gateway down. We need to look at way to keep this up. The conection also require human intervention and we need to investigate automation of this taks.

Network separation. The mesh is currently on the clinic network. The clinic does deal with sensitive data but also for security and management issues we need to seperate the neworks from each other.

Usage monitoring, charging. We need to begin monitoring and controlling usage so that we can explore charging models in the future.

Windows... it puts junk on the network. We need to look at simple firewall rules on the nodes to drop NetBEUI junk from the network.
Next steps

We will return to the site in a months time. At this time we wish to: separate the networks, install the school node, install a monitoring and access control system and announce a training course for the following month.

We will separate the networks by installing a new network card on the firewall. Most probably we will use NoCatAuth to control access to the network but need to investigate alternatives.

Other things to investigate are models for charging for network usage. Currently our strategy is to have farmers cross-subsidise the schools connectivity. A problem with this however is that other forms of connectivity are becoming relatively cheap (3G, etc) so this still needs to be reasonable.

== February 19, 2005, Too much sun for a geek ==

Day 4: Had steak at the conservancy meeting. Talked a little about the mesh - nobody understood what I was tgalking about... But getting cheap Internet sounded cool to them. The farmers have serious problem with Telk^h^h^h^h connectivity, phones, lightning, macadamia thieves, water, etc.

Day 5: Dave J works for a big parastatal like company which means he always comes late cause someone wants him to do something (he tells me he was fighting Jhb traffic to get more Linksys boxes. Mainly spent the morning getting ntop (a great network monitoring tool working) and got EtherApe (nice graphical monitoring tool) working. These are quite good for seeing how badly Windows abuses network resources.

Spent the afternoon with David at Sikhile High. Was pretty fruitless we couldn't work out if it was the box, antennae, or sun that was messing us around.

Day 6: Installed the USAid node properly. Took a long time and got really sunburned. Note to self need a ladder, suntan lotion, umbrella and LOTS of water. Installed a 90deg patch panel. We had major problems getting links to the clinic which was frustrating.

== February 17, 2005, More meshing ==

Day 3 cont...: Got USAid online, had been switched off not blown up by lightning. Phew. Installed a second mesh point which proved not to be needed. Worked out how to add parameters to the Kismet display, only worked out later that the signal strength bar graph is completely arbitrary. Will need to check all that again today. Installed an AP on the accomodation block, this seems a waste and we will probnably run cable from an AP installed on the staff flats instead.

Day 4: David J should be joining me today and we will be meeting with the farmers in the conservancy for a braai. I hope that we can raise the issue of what we are building and get people excited. Just before leaving yesterday I got everything up: I can ping all the other APs and can get out onto the net. I'll be checking this again remotely to see if I can get from USAid, to the clinic and out.

== February 16, 2005, Meshing ==

I've had a busy few days here in Peables Valley:

Day 1: Setup a linksys on the roof of the clinic. Found that we really can't see Petra from here or anywhere actually, Petra is a nice high point but all buildings are hidden behind a large rock. We installed one at a house belonging to consultants for USAid. This is a good site as we can see the staff flats from there but none of the other buildings. The problem with this is we now need to find a good spot at the clinic so that we can see USAid without using two APs at the clinic.

I visited the school, unfortunately Mr Sihlabela is off ill until March. I met with the principal and two other teachers and have agreed to visit on Friday with David. The school can see USAid but we still need to confirm the signal strength.

In discussions with various people I realised that lightning is going to be a serious problem. With all the equipment on an AP costing about R2,000 it can cripple a network if they have a serious strike.

Day 2: A frustrating day trying to get Kismet working. This involved creating a patched kernel to allow the orinoco driver to go into Monitor mode. Finding, downloading and compiling takes a long time. I did manage to get onto the clinic roof and confirm that we couldn't see a signal from USAid. We did get a signal from the staff flats.

In discussing uses for the network we had some new ideas:

* Getting house ridden patients a computer to get them communicating and getting outside virtually.
* Having the same patient do data capturing to bolster his income
* We also talked about using SMS and cellphones for compliance. Setting alarms for medicine taking. SMS messages that require a reply to check compliance. Notifying support group buddies about people not replying to SMS notification so that they can check that they're OK.

Day 3: Kismet is working! Not all the information is that useful for what I need to do. Met the clinic staff today to try and explain what we're doing. Today I'm checking signal strength from the school, its seems however that USAid is offline.

== February 11, 2005, Equipment got ==

We now have the equipment for the FMFI Wireless project in Mpumalanga. We have 10 Linksys wireless AP which we're firmware upgrading. The cards are in a nice heavy duty all weather box. A picture would be great :). All the boxes are being moded to do power over ethernet which makes hte whole installation clean and simple. Currently it looks like costs are around R2,000 a node.

I'm lugging the lot down to White River this weekend and will erect 3 of the nodes. Mainly to test equipment and get a working initial network. The other nodes will be setup by the community, following the Onno Purbo style of network deployment.

Mpumulanga Mesh

2006-01-04T16:17:27Z

Kilos: /* July 06, 2005, Realisation of a mesh vision */

== Location ==

White River is a medium sized town about 20 minutes north of Nelspruit, the capital of Mpumalanga Province. Peables Valley and the Masoi Tribal land is located 20 minutes to the North East of White River along the road leading to the Kruger National Parks Numbi gate.

The area is hilly with some large granite outcrops. The Peables Valley stretches from the ACTS clinic and divides the commercial farms from the Masoi area. Commercial farming in the broader area is predominately timber but fortunately along the valley there is no timber farming (this would pose a connectivity problem and impact line of sight requirements). The farmers as a community are already well connected (organisationally not in terms of Internet connectivity) with commando like structures in place because of crime.

The ACTS clinic is located at the beginning of the Valley. ACTS stands for AIDS Care Training and Support Clinic. They provide medical services to AIDS patients, councilling, testing and Anti-retroviral (ARV) treatment. The clinic has gained a reputation within the community with many people coming from outside of the Masoyi area for treatment. They are have been selected for managing ARV roleout because of their well developed councilling, testing and support group networks. Currently they have about 200 people on ARVs with this figure likely to grow to over 600. These treatements are being monitored by researchers at WITS University.

The Masoyi area runs along the right hand side of the valley. We identified approximately 10 schools, with two identified as being high schools with computer facilities. The project team has good links to a teacher in one of these schools who is in charge of the computer lab. In the area there is also a teachers training centre, government hospital and various government clinics in the area. The ACTS clinic runs a hospice close to one of the Government clinics.

== Situation in the Community ==

The community is underserviced. Most roads remain unpaved with the main road having been rebuilt after the floods of 2000. Electricity is available within the community.
The community is poor and has been hugely impacted by AIDS. Losing salaried member of households through AIDS has a bi impact on extended families. There is also the associated superstition and secretiveness around AIDS which does not help improve the situation.

== ACTS clinic ==

The clinic is a non-profit organisation established to provide AIDS care in the Masoyi area. It was initially sponsored by Glaxo Smithcline. The clinic has two doctors, an onsite hospice, training centre and accomodation for people on training courses.

A number of staff have been trained to provide pre-test and post-test councilling. This leaves the doctors free to focus on the medical aspects of treatment. The clinic operates in many ways like a private doctors practice. They charge consultation fees and patients on medical aid are charged accordingly. They however usually waive all fees as soon as it is established that a patient is suffering from AIDS. The clinic is relatively sopphisticated in their use of computers: they run practice management software, are connected to the Internet via Vsat for their research with WITS. They also have some custom MS Access based applications written internally to track patient statistics.

== Proposed Solution ==

Deploy a mesh network within the Peables Valley, run training courses to transfer skills on mesh setup and installation, work together with the clinic staff using Free Attitude Interviews (FAI) to discover applications and uses that work for the staff.

== What problem is being addressed ==

The main thrust is to connect the clinic to its community hospice and thus allow them to extend their computer facilities to the hospice (practise management software and statistics gathering). This is most easily achieved through a wireless network and more specifically a mesh because of the terrain.

A mesh network requires a number of nodes in areas not owned by the clinic but that are part of the commuity: schools and farmers. The main thrust of the research question is to implement the network in such a way that the firstly the clinic and secondly the community have taken ownership of the network. That they have created systems that ensure that the infrastructure is maintained and expanded by the users of the network.

== Technology Explained ==

A wireless network involves radios and arials. The radios broadcast and receive signals which are boosted and directed by the arials. Anyone with a radio can access the network. The spectrum used for Wifi required line-of-sight for connectivity. The routes between sites are also hard coded or manually adjusted in each device. This makes it technically difficult on two levels. Firstly, you need a deaper understanding or the radio spectrum and the operation of radio wave and secondly, configuration of the equipment requires a higher level of skill.

A mesh network uses the same infrastructure: aerials and radios. But at the network level it operated differently. The network simply requires that each node can see at least one other node (ie it can be part of the network) and that each node can send trafic to any node on the network (ie there are no islands which are not connected to the whole). In a mesh network this problem is solved at the software level. As long as your node can see another node it will be able to determine the routes to follow. The also allows for a level of self healing and thus less maintenance. If for example a truck parks in from of the node or a tree grows up over time and block the signal to another node then as long as the node can see an alternate node it can route traffic via this new path. On a conventional wireless network this would need to be manually configured.

The choice of mesh in the Peables Valley was made for these reasons:
Hilly terrain that requires a number of hops to reach the destination
Low skilled network operators
Changing conditions in the environment. Nodes that disappear through neglect, theft, obstruction.

== Social Challenges ==

There are a number of social challenges:

Firstly, for the the network to operate to serivice firstly the clinic and secondly the community it requires the cooperations of teachers in schools and of farmers. They all have there own agenda's there own perceptions of their expected level of involvment and their expectation of how aid is given to them.

In the school we are concerned about a hand-out mentality that will not see the school working hard to be involved in the extension of the mesh but simply being involved as long as it takes to link the school to the Internet. There is also the risk of our contact at the school wanting to be seen as being in charge and not wanting to work together with schools in the community.

To addess that we are looking at bringing the school pupils into the process from the beginning and teaching them how to install and configure equipment.

Secondly, with the farmers we are confident that it will be easy to sell them the concept of Internet connectivity. However, for the network to work for them will require that they connect to schools in the Masoyi area. We are not certain about the realtionship between these two groups. Considering the crime levels there is the risk that there is not a good level of trust.

Our strategy is to involve people from both groups during training workshops. Which at the very least would allow realtionships to be established.

Lastly, this is not the primary focus of the ACTS clinic so there will always be the risk that people are redeployed.

However, our main contact in the clinic is an electrical engineer by profession and the clinic itself has proved that they are a teaching organisation (their previous garder now runs the reception).

== Technical Challenges ==

Mesh networks are a new phenomena with the software sometimes not yet at the level required for the mesh to operate well. There is the risk that in this project we will discover the limitations of the technology and have to spend time compensating for that.

Some of the endpoint nodes we have identified require many hops. This requires many nodes. This is both a social and technical challenge. Social in that the project needs to bring each of those players on board and technical in that each of those nodes needs to be built, deployed and maintained.

There is also the risk of theft. The node equipment has very little commercial resale value in the community, although there seems to be wifi operating in the Nelspruit, White River area. However, that never seems to be a consideration of petty thieves. Hopefully deploying the equipment in established locations: schools, shops, private homes and not simply in the open will help secure the equipment.

== Equipment Ownership ==

As the objective is to create a community based network where the network is seen as a community asset so therefore some of the equipment at key nodes should belong to the community. Official ownership will be with the ACTS clinic until such time as a more formal structure for ownership of key mesh equipment can be established.

As the mesh grows individual node owners will own their own equipment. So a farmer or school will be the owner of that equipment and it will form part of the mesh. It is hoped that farmers will partner with institutions such as schools in which case the partners will define ownership relationships.

The project does not envision supplying any equipment to farmers unless they are located such that having equipment on their farm is critical to creating the mesh. In such as case we would look at funding that node if the project has to but the project will still attempt to have the farmer install his/her own equipment.

== Intellectual Property ==

The project will release all work under a suitable Open Source license. This work includes documentation and results of the research.

The project will not be developing any independent software but will be using other freely available mesh software. In the case that software is improved or modified it will be released under the license of the original software project to ensure that it can be included in future releases of that software.

== Sustainability ==

A key component to sustainability will be involvement of the farmers, Bible colleges, etc within the Peables Valley. The project will draw in the farmers for the following reasons: 1) they are a source of skills, 2) they have finances to pay for Internet connectivity and 3) that once they become users they are likely to become dependent on the mesh and thus ensure its ongoing success.

Part of the program will be to educate participants from the start so that they can extend the reach of the mesh. Included will be education of pupils from the partner schools. This education is designed to ensure that enough skills are available in the valley to repair nodes, setup new nodes, manage the mesh and train others.

A key component to the sustainability is that the project manager as the ACTS clinic is a qualified electrical engineer. We are therefore confident that it will not be difficult to educate him on the workings of the mesh network. He has already demonstrated his excitement and commitment to the project by spending a Saturday with the project leaders evaluating high sites. He is involved in training staff and is extremely practical so will be invaluable in erecting high sites.

== Pros and Cons of the system ==

First considering some positive aspects of the mesh. Firstly the clinic is already using IT infrastructure in the following areas: ARV monitoring, clinic management and accounts. Farmer, bible colleges, etc in the community already use the Internet for email etc but usually at great cost because of the limited choice of commectivity options. The partner schools already has a lab that has in the past been connected to the Internet. So there is already a body of people who have demonstrated the willingness or need to use the Internet who we feel would be willing the use a mesh if it provide always on and lower Internet connectivity costs.

The potential problems we see are the following. There is the risk that the effort to manage or be part of the mesh may be more expensive then direct connection especially in the case of the lack of good neighbourliness from any mesh participant. The clinic, although they currently use IT extensively, may in fact not need to extend that usage beyond the main clinic. The risk with the schools we feel is that there is a general hand-out mentality and that there will not be the will to learn, extend the network or integrate this into the curriculum. Another large risk is the sustainability of the network not from the mesh side but from the side of financing the hop onto the Internet itself.

== Backhaul Connectivity ==

The connectivity to ACTS is provided via Telkom VSAT. ACTS uses the connection as part of their involvement in ARV roleout for the Right To Care group. They have an Internet based application for capturing details of patients for monitoring and evaluating patients receiving ARVs

== Network Topology ==

[[Image:Acts meshnet.jpg]]

== News Flashes ==

== September 22, 2005, WiFi in the bush or the plot ==

Duane visited the IDRC funded workshop for WiFi in Africa. Sorry don't knwo what the real project name is. Sat in on the session on regulation, the Department of Communications delegates decided that this would be a good time to leave. Nice when you know you can't actually stand the heat.

Had a look at their cantenna based access-point liming over about 5km. With a Linksys strapped to a tree with... red tape... man we can't get away from red tape in this industry.

Most surprising was plot.net a local WISP that delivers Internet to about 100 customers and nobody new that they existed before booking the venue. They do long haul links to ADSL connections in Pretoria. Quite an innoative solution to high cost access. I want to explore that possibility in Peebles Valley.

== October 06, 2005 Wikipedia on the mesh ==

David and I visited the Peebles Mesh this week for two days and here is
a quick synopsis of events:

- We installed a firewall. This has software which should allow us to
control and cap bandwidth and it separates us from the clinic.
- We installed a local copy of Wikipedia. Still some bugs but very fast
- We can now access the site remotely

Big SURPRISE

Our cantennae was still operating! We did a data transfer from the
wireless box to ourselves. 3 hops I think at 192kB/s

First farmer online

We connected the chairman of the local farmers group to the Internet.
It was lovely we just watched and took notes. The farmers younger
brother had returned from the UK with a new laptop. We got that
connected. The first thing he asked is if he could download music - ho
hum :)

The sister of the farmer was also visiting and started giving her mother
a sales pitch about how they could talk to each other using skype for
free.

Was lovely to watch and we had boere kos but arrived a bit late for
lunch. We will ensure that doesn't happen again.

== July 06, 2005, Realisation of a mesh vision ==

Today we had a film crew filming the installation of a mesh node. It was great fun but they did waste our time a bit. Technically this is what we got done:

* Installed the node on Agnus' house permanently. Lassy did all this work
* Put a 3m pole at the Hospice to see if we can get over the ridge
* Upgraded AGNUS, HOSPICE and SIKILE to OpenWrt
* The clinic is cabled to various buildings so we will be able to recover one node and just run a cable from the FLATS node to the VSAT.

We had a 7ms delay between AGNUS and ACTS_VSAT which is a route that passes through all present nodes. VoIP is now truely achievable. Wonderful performance compared to WDS mode. Throw out WDS wherever you see it its just not worth the effort. It is honestly more simple to setup OLSR. Glad we've learnt that and can move on.

We still ahve the following technical hurdles to overcome. The default route keeps disappearing. We need to install a proper firewall. Once that is done we can move onto the community adoption.

The day was full of some lovely experiences of the potential of what we are doing.

Once we had AGNUS up we setup Dave's laptop and had Agnus' daughter and a neighbour sit at the computer. Dave opened Google. They didn't know what to do. We asked them waht infomration they wanted to know. Stuck again. "Who is your favourite singer?" - Alicia Keys - "OK type that in the seach box, then click on search" - Shouts of glee as the search results return. "Now click here". Off they went to Alecia Keys home site and disappeared for about 10 minutes. Does that count as training? The two of them were sitting inside quite a dark house, they sat together on a sofa and the laptop screen glowed in the semi-dark with their face highlighted. This exact image was the vision I had for this project. So that made my day.

I did a quick training course in the dirt. Explaining what the differnt aerials did, how it all fitted together. And of course how to use a high-gain antenna as a fish braai. Lassy provided Swati translation as soon as there was any confusion.

Now off to the school to film students working on computers. They wanted to interview the teacher, who was a standin for Mr Sihlabela who we usualy work with. "What will you use the Internet for at your school", to which he replied, "I don't know". David did a quick exercise of taking the teacher, a history teacher, to Google. They Googled for "Shaka Zulu" and ended up at a very good site on the subject. "What will you use the Internet for at your school", and we got a 5 minute reply. Does that count as training?

What worked best about this trip was having a very focused objective - get the mesh working. We didn't care about the firewall, the billing, shapping, etc. And we got it done. The next trips will be similarly techically focussed.

== July 05,2005 Moving on to OLSR ==

I left Peebles Valley at the end of May and this is the first return since then. David and I are migrating all the Linksys boxes from Sveasoft to OpenWrt, specifically the builds produced by Freifunk which has a nice web interface. Lassy has joined us again and is helping us move the equipment around.

The task involves loading the Freifunk firmware onto the box. This requires local connectivity. We still had connection problem until we discovered the ghosts of a WDS past. Alot of WDS settings were still on each of the boxes. We've now had to go and remove those especially the Lazy WDS mode settings which keep establishing bridges. OLSR looks like the right solution. Its the same amount of work as WDS setup but you get real routes, ones that you see and can traceroute through so you can actually see exactly how packets are being routed on the network. I'm much much happier. Yesterday we got USAID, ACTS_VSAT and ACTS_FLATS converted. Today we are in the field with a film crew and will migrate: AGNUS house, SIKILE_HIGH and FARM_COBUS. If we can get traffic from either Agnus' house or Cobus' farm then we know that the protocol is good, both these points would have to route through. SIKILE, USAID, ACTS_FLATS then ACTS_VSAT. WDS could never do that and if we can get this working then the mesh is good and we can move onto the next challenging problem.

At the last conservancy meeting at which ACTS clinic was present they mentioned the Mesh but all the farmers were wondering when exactly anything would happen. Hopefully we have a working system before we leave.

We also spoke to Frans Benz whose property is below USAID and he is still interested.

Of the nodes that we have observed all were powered up except ACTS_VSAT this was good as it means that people are leaving the equipment to do its job. THe VSAT was down because the plug is just too close to a useful double adapter.

We have brought 300m of CAT5 cable which the clinic will use to run cable from the VSat to the Flat so we can eliminate one node and use it elsewhere. This clinic has arranged conduit and pulling of the cables.

== February 19, 2005, Lessons learned from week long meshing ==

Lessons learnt

* Test test test: test devices in a known controlled environment. The box couldn't connect and we weren't sure exactly why.
* Use your own stuff: don't use other peoples stuff. We tried to use the alarm companies mast, it was rubbish and about to fall down. But it could also endanger our equipment when the alarm company removes there antennae.
* Equipment: cover for your laptop so you can see the screen. Backpack/fishing jacket also a head- mounted display wouldn't hurt (to monitor the wireless network). Rifle-mounted antennae with sight. Tri-pod for temporary mounting of equipment. Ladders are a problem you need a long extension ladder about 6m.
* Windows Sucks: we had major packet drop yet on Linux the network pings work perfectly. Either Windows has a simple and incompetant network layer or it puts so much rubbish on the network that it sucks up all bandwidth. Why do people use this rubbish!
* Testing protocol: It would be usefull to have a set standard of how you tackle problem. Many time you go down the wrong route. Simple idea: mount antennae with laptop and get signal strengths right. Then connect box browse to the box over the wire and check for links. Lastly connect to the box as a wireless client.

Observations on the first stage

The object of this exercise was for David and I to learn how to setup the equipment before involving the community. This objective has been met: the mesh functions well, we can monitor it and we can use it from any node.
Successes

We created a 4 node mesh that works and can connect to the Internet. Although we had issues these were just teething problem for the technicians and the hardware is really box-drop ready. This is really positive for a non-technical mesh community.

We met with the farmers and they now know what we are doing which give us easier access to their properties. The USAid couple were very helpful, very keen and are well known and liked in the community. We hope that this relationship and them being early users will help increase adoption within the farming community.

We validated that we can connect to the school through the USAid node. Although our contact at the school was on sick leave the principle made arrangements for another teacher to stay after school on Friday for almost 4 hours while we attempted to setup their node. We also noted the school now has a 15 seat computer lab.

The ACTS clinic staff were quite excited especially those that are volunteers from overseas. A number of ideas for the use of the network were put forward by the staff. These included using house bound AIDS patients to data capture for the clinic or simply to create new virtual relationships. Also suggested was using instant messaging as a form of anonymous counciling to allow school pupils to speak openly about AIDS.
Issues noted

Support! We have already got our first support call from people who use operating system that know better then you what they want to do. This is a source of potential problems as people will phone the clinic and overbuden an already busy staff. We need to investigate how the community can provide that support or busget to pay for such support.

Lightning! This is going to be a serious problem, there are solutions such as mast spikes that we need to install.

Power downs. The clinic powers off most of their equipment at night thus taking the gateway down. We need to look at way to keep this up. The conection also require human intervention and we need to investigate automation of this taks.

Network separation. The mesh is currently on the clinic network. The clinic does deal with sensitive data but also for security and management issues we need to seperate the neworks from each other.

Usage monitoring, charging. We need to begin monitoring and controlling usage so that we can explore charging models in the future.

Windows... it puts junk on the network. We need to look at simple firewall rules on the nodes to drop NetBEUI junk from the network.
Next steps

We will return to the site in a months time. At this time we wish to: separate the networks, install the school node, install a monitoring and access control system and announce a training course for the following month.

We will separate the networks by installing a new network card on the firewall. Most probably we will use NoCatAuth to control access to the network but need to investigate alternatives.

Other things to investigate are models for charging for network usage. Currently our strategy is to have farmers cross-subsidise the schools connectivity. A problem with this however is that other forms of connectivity are becoming relatively cheap (3G, etc) so this still needs to be reasonable.

== February 19, 2005, Too much sun for a geek ==

Day 4: Had steak at the conservancy meeting. Talked a little about the mesh - nobody understood what I was tgalking about... But getting cheap Internet sounded cool to them. The farmers have serious problem with Telk^h^h^h^h connectivity, phones, lightning, macadamia thieves, water, etc.

Day 5: Dave J works for a big parastatal like company which means he always comes late cause someone wants him to do something (he tells me he was fighting Jhb traffic to get more Linksys boxes. Mainly spent the morning getting ntop (a great network monitoring tool working) and got EtherApe (nice graphical monitoring tool) working. These are quite good for seeing how badly Windows abuses network resources.

Spent the afternoon with David at Sikhile High. Was pretty fruitless we couldn't work out if it was the box, antennae, or sun that was messing us around.

Day 6: Installed the USAid node properly. Took a long time and got really sunburned. Note to self need a ladder, suntan lotion, umbrella and LOTS of water. Installed a 90deg patch panel. We had major problems getting links to the clinic which was frustrating.

== February 17, 2005, More meshing ==

Day 3 cont...: Got USAid online, had been switched off not blown up by lightning. Phew. Installed a second mesh point which proved not to be needed. Worked out how to add parameters to the Kismet display, only worked out later that the signal strength bar graph is completely arbitrary. Will need to check all that again today. Installed an AP on the accomodation block, this seems a waste and we will probnably run cable from an AP installed on the staff flats instead.

Day 4: David J should be joining me today and we will be meeting with the farmers in the conservancy for a braai. I hope that we can raise the issue of what we are building and get people excited. Just before leaving yesterday I got everything up: I can ping all the other APs and can get out onto the net. I'll be checking this again remotely to see if I can get from USAid, to the clinic and out.

== February 16, 2005, Meshing ==

I've had a busy few days here in Peables Valley:

Day 1: Setup a linksys on the roof of the clinic. Found that we really can't see Petra from here or anywhere actually, Petra is a nice high point but all buildings are hidden behind a large rock. We installed one at a house belonging to consultants for USAid. This is a good site as we can see the staff flats from there but none of the other buildings. The problem with this is we now need to find a good spot at the clinic so that we can see USAid without using two APs at the clinic.

I visited the school, unfortunately Mr Sihlabela is off ill until March. I met with the principal and two other teachers and have agreed to visit on Friday with David. The school can see USAid but we still need to confirm the signal strength.

In discussions with various people I realised that lightning is going to be a serious problem. With all the equipment on an AP costing about R2,000 it can cripple a network if they have a serious strike.

Day 2: A frustrating day trying to get Kismet working. This involved creating a patched kernel to allow the orinoco driver to go into Monitor mode. Finding, downloading and compiling takes a long time. I did manage to get onto the clinic roof and confirm that we couldn't see a signal from USAid. We did get a signal from the staff flats.

In discussing uses for the network we had some new ideas:

* Getting house ridden patients a computer to get them communicating and getting outside virtually.
* Having the same patient do data capturing to bolster his income
* We also talked about using SMS and cellphones for compliance. Setting alarms for medicine taking. SMS messages that require a reply to check compliance. Notifying support group buddies about people not replying to SMS notification so that they can check that they're OK.

Day 3: Kismet is working! Not all the information is that useful for what I need to do. Met the clinic staff today to try and explain what we're doing. Today I'm checking signal strength from the school, its seems however that USAid is offline.

== February 11, 2005, Equipment got ==

We now have the equipment for the FMFI Wireless project in Mpumalanga. We have 10 Linksys wireless AP which we're firmware upgrading. The cards are in a nice heavy duty all weather box. A picture would be great :). All the boxes are being moded to do power over ethernet which makes hte whole installation clean and simple. Currently it looks like costs are around R2,000 a node.

I'm lugging the lot down to White River this weekend and will erect 3 of the nodes. Mainly to test equipment and get a working initial network. The other nodes will be setup by the community, following the Onno Purbo style of network deployment.

Mpumulanga Mesh

2006-01-04T16:16:14Z

Kilos: /* July 06, 2005, Realisation of a mesh vision */

== Location ==

White River is a medium sized town about 20 minutes north of Nelspruit, the capital of Mpumalanga Province. Peables Valley and the Masoi Tribal land is located 20 minutes to the North East of White River along the road leading to the Kruger National Parks Numbi gate.

The area is hilly with some large granite outcrops. The Peables Valley stretches from the ACTS clinic and divides the commercial farms from the Masoi area. Commercial farming in the broader area is predominately timber but fortunately along the valley there is no timber farming (this would pose a connectivity problem and impact line of sight requirements). The farmers as a community are already well connected (organisationally not in terms of Internet connectivity) with commando like structures in place because of crime.

The ACTS clinic is located at the beginning of the Valley. ACTS stands for AIDS Care Training and Support Clinic. They provide medical services to AIDS patients, councilling, testing and Anti-retroviral (ARV) treatment. The clinic has gained a reputation within the community with many people coming from outside of the Masoyi area for treatment. They are have been selected for managing ARV roleout because of their well developed councilling, testing and support group networks. Currently they have about 200 people on ARVs with this figure likely to grow to over 600. These treatements are being monitored by researchers at WITS University.

The Masoyi area runs along the right hand side of the valley. We identified approximately 10 schools, with two identified as being high schools with computer facilities. The project team has good links to a teacher in one of these schools who is in charge of the computer lab. In the area there is also a teachers training centre, government hospital and various government clinics in the area. The ACTS clinic runs a hospice close to one of the Government clinics.

== Situation in the Community ==

The community is underserviced. Most roads remain unpaved with the main road having been rebuilt after the floods of 2000. Electricity is available within the community.
The community is poor and has been hugely impacted by AIDS. Losing salaried member of households through AIDS has a bi impact on extended families. There is also the associated superstition and secretiveness around AIDS which does not help improve the situation.

== ACTS clinic ==

The clinic is a non-profit organisation established to provide AIDS care in the Masoyi area. It was initially sponsored by Glaxo Smithcline. The clinic has two doctors, an onsite hospice, training centre and accomodation for people on training courses.

A number of staff have been trained to provide pre-test and post-test councilling. This leaves the doctors free to focus on the medical aspects of treatment. The clinic operates in many ways like a private doctors practice. They charge consultation fees and patients on medical aid are charged accordingly. They however usually waive all fees as soon as it is established that a patient is suffering from AIDS. The clinic is relatively sopphisticated in their use of computers: they run practice management software, are connected to the Internet via Vsat for their research with WITS. They also have some custom MS Access based applications written internally to track patient statistics.

== Proposed Solution ==

Deploy a mesh network within the Peables Valley, run training courses to transfer skills on mesh setup and installation, work together with the clinic staff using Free Attitude Interviews (FAI) to discover applications and uses that work for the staff.

== What problem is being addressed ==

The main thrust is to connect the clinic to its community hospice and thus allow them to extend their computer facilities to the hospice (practise management software and statistics gathering). This is most easily achieved through a wireless network and more specifically a mesh because of the terrain.

A mesh network requires a number of nodes in areas not owned by the clinic but that are part of the commuity: schools and farmers. The main thrust of the research question is to implement the network in such a way that the firstly the clinic and secondly the community have taken ownership of the network. That they have created systems that ensure that the infrastructure is maintained and expanded by the users of the network.

== Technology Explained ==

A wireless network involves radios and arials. The radios broadcast and receive signals which are boosted and directed by the arials. Anyone with a radio can access the network. The spectrum used for Wifi required line-of-sight for connectivity. The routes between sites are also hard coded or manually adjusted in each device. This makes it technically difficult on two levels. Firstly, you need a deaper understanding or the radio spectrum and the operation of radio wave and secondly, configuration of the equipment requires a higher level of skill.

A mesh network uses the same infrastructure: aerials and radios. But at the network level it operated differently. The network simply requires that each node can see at least one other node (ie it can be part of the network) and that each node can send trafic to any node on the network (ie there are no islands which are not connected to the whole). In a mesh network this problem is solved at the software level. As long as your node can see another node it will be able to determine the routes to follow. The also allows for a level of self healing and thus less maintenance. If for example a truck parks in from of the node or a tree grows up over time and block the signal to another node then as long as the node can see an alternate node it can route traffic via this new path. On a conventional wireless network this would need to be manually configured.

The choice of mesh in the Peables Valley was made for these reasons:
Hilly terrain that requires a number of hops to reach the destination
Low skilled network operators
Changing conditions in the environment. Nodes that disappear through neglect, theft, obstruction.

== Social Challenges ==

There are a number of social challenges:

Firstly, for the the network to operate to serivice firstly the clinic and secondly the community it requires the cooperations of teachers in schools and of farmers. They all have there own agenda's there own perceptions of their expected level of involvment and their expectation of how aid is given to them.

In the school we are concerned about a hand-out mentality that will not see the school working hard to be involved in the extension of the mesh but simply being involved as long as it takes to link the school to the Internet. There is also the risk of our contact at the school wanting to be seen as being in charge and not wanting to work together with schools in the community.

To addess that we are looking at bringing the school pupils into the process from the beginning and teaching them how to install and configure equipment.

Secondly, with the farmers we are confident that it will be easy to sell them the concept of Internet connectivity. However, for the network to work for them will require that they connect to schools in the Masoyi area. We are not certain about the realtionship between these two groups. Considering the crime levels there is the risk that there is not a good level of trust.

Our strategy is to involve people from both groups during training workshops. Which at the very least would allow realtionships to be established.

Lastly, this is not the primary focus of the ACTS clinic so there will always be the risk that people are redeployed.

However, our main contact in the clinic is an electrical engineer by profession and the clinic itself has proved that they are a teaching organisation (their previous garder now runs the reception).

== Technical Challenges ==

Mesh networks are a new phenomena with the software sometimes not yet at the level required for the mesh to operate well. There is the risk that in this project we will discover the limitations of the technology and have to spend time compensating for that.

Some of the endpoint nodes we have identified require many hops. This requires many nodes. This is both a social and technical challenge. Social in that the project needs to bring each of those players on board and technical in that each of those nodes needs to be built, deployed and maintained.

There is also the risk of theft. The node equipment has very little commercial resale value in the community, although there seems to be wifi operating in the Nelspruit, White River area. However, that never seems to be a consideration of petty thieves. Hopefully deploying the equipment in established locations: schools, shops, private homes and not simply in the open will help secure the equipment.

== Equipment Ownership ==

As the objective is to create a community based network where the network is seen as a community asset so therefore some of the equipment at key nodes should belong to the community. Official ownership will be with the ACTS clinic until such time as a more formal structure for ownership of key mesh equipment can be established.

As the mesh grows individual node owners will own their own equipment. So a farmer or school will be the owner of that equipment and it will form part of the mesh. It is hoped that farmers will partner with institutions such as schools in which case the partners will define ownership relationships.

The project does not envision supplying any equipment to farmers unless they are located such that having equipment on their farm is critical to creating the mesh. In such as case we would look at funding that node if the project has to but the project will still attempt to have the farmer install his/her own equipment.

== Intellectual Property ==

The project will release all work under a suitable Open Source license. This work includes documentation and results of the research.

The project will not be developing any independent software but will be using other freely available mesh software. In the case that software is improved or modified it will be released under the license of the original software project to ensure that it can be included in future releases of that software.

== Sustainability ==

A key component to sustainability will be involvement of the farmers, Bible colleges, etc within the Peables Valley. The project will draw in the farmers for the following reasons: 1) they are a source of skills, 2) they have finances to pay for Internet connectivity and 3) that once they become users they are likely to become dependent on the mesh and thus ensure its ongoing success.

Part of the program will be to educate participants from the start so that they can extend the reach of the mesh. Included will be education of pupils from the partner schools. This education is designed to ensure that enough skills are available in the valley to repair nodes, setup new nodes, manage the mesh and train others.

A key component to the sustainability is that the project manager as the ACTS clinic is a qualified electrical engineer. We are therefore confident that it will not be difficult to educate him on the workings of the mesh network. He has already demonstrated his excitement and commitment to the project by spending a Saturday with the project leaders evaluating high sites. He is involved in training staff and is extremely practical so will be invaluable in erecting high sites.

== Pros and Cons of the system ==

First considering some positive aspects of the mesh. Firstly the clinic is already using IT infrastructure in the following areas: ARV monitoring, clinic management and accounts. Farmer, bible colleges, etc in the community already use the Internet for email etc but usually at great cost because of the limited choice of commectivity options. The partner schools already has a lab that has in the past been connected to the Internet. So there is already a body of people who have demonstrated the willingness or need to use the Internet who we feel would be willing the use a mesh if it provide always on and lower Internet connectivity costs.

The potential problems we see are the following. There is the risk that the effort to manage or be part of the mesh may be more expensive then direct connection especially in the case of the lack of good neighbourliness from any mesh participant. The clinic, although they currently use IT extensively, may in fact not need to extend that usage beyond the main clinic. The risk with the schools we feel is that there is a general hand-out mentality and that there will not be the will to learn, extend the network or integrate this into the curriculum. Another large risk is the sustainability of the network not from the mesh side but from the side of financing the hop onto the Internet itself.

== Backhaul Connectivity ==

The connectivity to ACTS is provided via Telkom VSAT. ACTS uses the connection as part of their involvement in ARV roleout for the Right To Care group. They have an Internet based application for capturing details of patients for monitoring and evaluating patients receiving ARVs

== Network Topology ==

[[Image:Acts meshnet.jpg]]

== News Flashes ==

== September 22, 2005, WiFi in the bush or the plot ==

Duane visited the IDRC funded workshop for WiFi in Africa. Sorry don't knwo what the real project name is. Sat in on the session on regulation, the Department of Communications delegates decided that this would be a good time to leave. Nice when you know you can't actually stand the heat.

Had a look at their cantenna based access-point liming over about 5km. With a Linksys strapped to a tree with... red tape... man we can't get away from red tape in this industry.

Most surprising was plot.net a local WISP that delivers Internet to about 100 customers and nobody new that they existed before booking the venue. They do long haul links to ADSL connections in Pretoria. Quite an innoative solution to high cost access. I want to explore that possibility in Peebles Valley.

== October 06, 2005 Wikipedia on the mesh ==

David and I visited the Peebles Mesh this week for two days and here is
a quick synopsis of events:

- We installed a firewall. This has software which should allow us to
control and cap bandwidth and it separates us from the clinic.
- We installed a local copy of Wikipedia. Still some bugs but very fast
- We can now access the site remotely

Big SURPRISE

Our cantennae was still operating! We did a data transfer from the
wireless box to ourselves. 3 hops I think at 192kB/s

First farmer online

We connected the chairman of the local farmers group to the Internet.
It was lovely we just watched and took notes. The farmers younger
brother had returned from the UK with a new laptop. We got that
connected. The first thing he asked is if he could download music - ho
hum :)

The sister of the farmer was also visiting and started giving her mother
a sales pitch about how they could talk to each other using skype for
free.

Was lovely to watch and we had boere kos but arrived a bit late for
lunch. We will ensure that doesn't happen again.

== July 06, 2005, Realisation of a mesh vision ==

Today we had a film crew filming the installation of a mesh node. It was great fun but they did waste our time a bit. Technically this is what we got done:

* Installed the node on Agnus' house permanently. Lassy did all this work
* Put a 3m pole at the Hospice to see if we can get over the ridge
* Upgraded AGNUS, HOSPICE and SIKILE to OpenWrt
* The clinic is cabling various buildings so we will be able to recover one node an just run a cable from the FLATS node to the VSAT.

We had a 7ms delay between AGNUS and ACTS_VSAT which is a route that passes through all present nodes. VoIP is now truely achievable. Wonderful performance compared to WDS mode. Throw out WDS wherever you see it its just not worth the effort. It is honestly more simple to setup OLSR. Glad we've learnt that and can move on.

We still ahve the following technical hurdles to overcome. The default route keeps disappearing. We need to install a proper firewall. Once that is done we can move onto the community adoption.

The day was full of some lovely experiences of the potential of what we are doing.

Once we had AGNUS up we setup Dave's laptop and had Agnus' daughter and a neighbour sit at the computer. Dave opened Google. They didn't know what to do. We asked them waht infomration they wanted to know. Stuck again. "Who is your favourite singer?" - Alicia Keys - "OK type that in the seach box, then click on search" - Shouts of glee as the search results return. "Now click here". Off they went to Alecia Keys home site and disappeared for about 10 minutes. Does that count as training? The two of them were sitting inside quite a dark house, they sat together on a sofa and the laptop screen glowed in the semi-dark with their face highlighted. This exact image was the vision I had for this project. So that made my day.

I did a quick training course in the dirt. Explaining what the differnt aerials did, how it all fitted together. And of course how to use a high-gain antenna as a fish braai. Lassy provided Swati translation as soon as there was any confusion.

Now off to the school to film students working on computers. They wanted to interview the teacher, who was a standin for Mr Sihlabela who we usualy work with. "What will you use the Internet for at your school", to which he replied, "I don't know". David did a quick exercise of taking the teacher, a history teacher, to Google. They Googled for "Shaka Zulu" and ended up at a very good site on the subject. "What will you use the Internet for at your school", and we got a 5 minute reply. Does that count as training?

What worked best about this trip was having a very focused objective - get the mesh working. We didn't care about the firewall, the billing, shapping, etc. And we got it done. The next trips will be similarly techically focussed.

== July 05,2005 Moving on to OLSR ==

I left Peebles Valley at the end of May and this is the first return since then. David and I are migrating all the Linksys boxes from Sveasoft to OpenWrt, specifically the builds produced by Freifunk which has a nice web interface. Lassy has joined us again and is helping us move the equipment around.

The task involves loading the Freifunk firmware onto the box. This requires local connectivity. We still had connection problem until we discovered the ghosts of a WDS past. Alot of WDS settings were still on each of the boxes. We've now had to go and remove those especially the Lazy WDS mode settings which keep establishing bridges. OLSR looks like the right solution. Its the same amount of work as WDS setup but you get real routes, ones that you see and can traceroute through so you can actually see exactly how packets are being routed on the network. I'm much much happier. Yesterday we got USAID, ACTS_VSAT and ACTS_FLATS converted. Today we are in the field with a film crew and will migrate: AGNUS house, SIKILE_HIGH and FARM_COBUS. If we can get traffic from either Agnus' house or Cobus' farm then we know that the protocol is good, both these points would have to route through. SIKILE, USAID, ACTS_FLATS then ACTS_VSAT. WDS could never do that and if we can get this working then the mesh is good and we can move onto the next challenging problem.

At the last conservancy meeting at which ACTS clinic was present they mentioned the Mesh but all the farmers were wondering when exactly anything would happen. Hopefully we have a working system before we leave.

We also spoke to Frans Benz whose property is below USAID and he is still interested.

Of the nodes that we have observed all were powered up except ACTS_VSAT this was good as it means that people are leaving the equipment to do its job. THe VSAT was down because the plug is just too close to a useful double adapter.

We have brought 300m of CAT5 cable which the clinic will use to run cable from the VSat to the Flat so we can eliminate one node and use it elsewhere. This clinic has arranged conduit and pulling of the cables.

== February 19, 2005, Lessons learned from week long meshing ==

Lessons learnt

* Test test test: test devices in a known controlled environment. The box couldn't connect and we weren't sure exactly why.
* Use your own stuff: don't use other peoples stuff. We tried to use the alarm companies mast, it was rubbish and about to fall down. But it could also endanger our equipment when the alarm company removes there antennae.
* Equipment: cover for your laptop so you can see the screen. Backpack/fishing jacket also a head- mounted display wouldn't hurt (to monitor the wireless network). Rifle-mounted antennae with sight. Tri-pod for temporary mounting of equipment. Ladders are a problem you need a long extension ladder about 6m.
* Windows Sucks: we had major packet drop yet on Linux the network pings work perfectly. Either Windows has a simple and incompetant network layer or it puts so much rubbish on the network that it sucks up all bandwidth. Why do people use this rubbish!
* Testing protocol: It would be usefull to have a set standard of how you tackle problem. Many time you go down the wrong route. Simple idea: mount antennae with laptop and get signal strengths right. Then connect box browse to the box over the wire and check for links. Lastly connect to the box as a wireless client.

Observations on the first stage

The object of this exercise was for David and I to learn how to setup the equipment before involving the community. This objective has been met: the mesh functions well, we can monitor it and we can use it from any node.
Successes

We created a 4 node mesh that works and can connect to the Internet. Although we had issues these were just teething problem for the technicians and the hardware is really box-drop ready. This is really positive for a non-technical mesh community.

We met with the farmers and they now know what we are doing which give us easier access to their properties. The USAid couple were very helpful, very keen and are well known and liked in the community. We hope that this relationship and them being early users will help increase adoption within the farming community.

We validated that we can connect to the school through the USAid node. Although our contact at the school was on sick leave the principle made arrangements for another teacher to stay after school on Friday for almost 4 hours while we attempted to setup their node. We also noted the school now has a 15 seat computer lab.

The ACTS clinic staff were quite excited especially those that are volunteers from overseas. A number of ideas for the use of the network were put forward by the staff. These included using house bound AIDS patients to data capture for the clinic or simply to create new virtual relationships. Also suggested was using instant messaging as a form of anonymous counciling to allow school pupils to speak openly about AIDS.
Issues noted

Support! We have already got our first support call from people who use operating system that know better then you what they want to do. This is a source of potential problems as people will phone the clinic and overbuden an already busy staff. We need to investigate how the community can provide that support or busget to pay for such support.

Lightning! This is going to be a serious problem, there are solutions such as mast spikes that we need to install.

Power downs. The clinic powers off most of their equipment at night thus taking the gateway down. We need to look at way to keep this up. The conection also require human intervention and we need to investigate automation of this taks.

Network separation. The mesh is currently on the clinic network. The clinic does deal with sensitive data but also for security and management issues we need to seperate the neworks from each other.

Usage monitoring, charging. We need to begin monitoring and controlling usage so that we can explore charging models in the future.

Windows... it puts junk on the network. We need to look at simple firewall rules on the nodes to drop NetBEUI junk from the network.
Next steps

We will return to the site in a months time. At this time we wish to: separate the networks, install the school node, install a monitoring and access control system and announce a training course for the following month.

We will separate the networks by installing a new network card on the firewall. Most probably we will use NoCatAuth to control access to the network but need to investigate alternatives.

Other things to investigate are models for charging for network usage. Currently our strategy is to have farmers cross-subsidise the schools connectivity. A problem with this however is that other forms of connectivity are becoming relatively cheap (3G, etc) so this still needs to be reasonable.

== February 19, 2005, Too much sun for a geek ==

Day 4: Had steak at the conservancy meeting. Talked a little about the mesh - nobody understood what I was tgalking about... But getting cheap Internet sounded cool to them. The farmers have serious problem with Telk^h^h^h^h connectivity, phones, lightning, macadamia thieves, water, etc.

Day 5: Dave J works for a big parastatal like company which means he always comes late cause someone wants him to do something (he tells me he was fighting Jhb traffic to get more Linksys boxes. Mainly spent the morning getting ntop (a great network monitoring tool working) and got EtherApe (nice graphical monitoring tool) working. These are quite good for seeing how badly Windows abuses network resources.

Spent the afternoon with David at Sikhile High. Was pretty fruitless we couldn't work out if it was the box, antennae, or sun that was messing us around.

Day 6: Installed the USAid node properly. Took a long time and got really sunburned. Note to self need a ladder, suntan lotion, umbrella and LOTS of water. Installed a 90deg patch panel. We had major problems getting links to the clinic which was frustrating.

== February 17, 2005, More meshing ==

Day 3 cont...: Got USAid online, had been switched off not blown up by lightning. Phew. Installed a second mesh point which proved not to be needed. Worked out how to add parameters to the Kismet display, only worked out later that the signal strength bar graph is completely arbitrary. Will need to check all that again today. Installed an AP on the accomodation block, this seems a waste and we will probnably run cable from an AP installed on the staff flats instead.

Day 4: David J should be joining me today and we will be meeting with the farmers in the conservancy for a braai. I hope that we can raise the issue of what we are building and get people excited. Just before leaving yesterday I got everything up: I can ping all the other APs and can get out onto the net. I'll be checking this again remotely to see if I can get from USAid, to the clinic and out.

== February 16, 2005, Meshing ==

I've had a busy few days here in Peables Valley:

Day 1: Setup a linksys on the roof of the clinic. Found that we really can't see Petra from here or anywhere actually, Petra is a nice high point but all buildings are hidden behind a large rock. We installed one at a house belonging to consultants for USAid. This is a good site as we can see the staff flats from there but none of the other buildings. The problem with this is we now need to find a good spot at the clinic so that we can see USAid without using two APs at the clinic.

I visited the school, unfortunately Mr Sihlabela is off ill until March. I met with the principal and two other teachers and have agreed to visit on Friday with David. The school can see USAid but we still need to confirm the signal strength.

In discussions with various people I realised that lightning is going to be a serious problem. With all the equipment on an AP costing about R2,000 it can cripple a network if they have a serious strike.

Day 2: A frustrating day trying to get Kismet working. This involved creating a patched kernel to allow the orinoco driver to go into Monitor mode. Finding, downloading and compiling takes a long time. I did manage to get onto the clinic roof and confirm that we couldn't see a signal from USAid. We did get a signal from the staff flats.

In discussing uses for the network we had some new ideas:

* Getting house ridden patients a computer to get them communicating and getting outside virtually.
* Having the same patient do data capturing to bolster his income
* We also talked about using SMS and cellphones for compliance. Setting alarms for medicine taking. SMS messages that require a reply to check compliance. Notifying support group buddies about people not replying to SMS notification so that they can check that they're OK.

Day 3: Kismet is working! Not all the information is that useful for what I need to do. Met the clinic staff today to try and explain what we're doing. Today I'm checking signal strength from the school, its seems however that USAid is offline.

== February 11, 2005, Equipment got ==

We now have the equipment for the FMFI Wireless project in Mpumalanga. We have 10 Linksys wireless AP which we're firmware upgrading. The cards are in a nice heavy duty all weather box. A picture would be great :). All the boxes are being moded to do power over ethernet which makes hte whole installation clean and simple. Currently it looks like costs are around R2,000 a node.

I'm lugging the lot down to White River this weekend and will erect 3 of the nodes. Mainly to test equipment and get a working initial network. The other nodes will be setup by the community, following the Onno Purbo style of network deployment.

Mpumulanga Mesh

2006-01-04T16:14:34Z

Kilos: /* July 05,2005 Moving on to OLSR */

== Location ==

White River is a medium sized town about 20 minutes north of Nelspruit, the capital of Mpumalanga Province. Peables Valley and the Masoi Tribal land is located 20 minutes to the North East of White River along the road leading to the Kruger National Parks Numbi gate.

The area is hilly with some large granite outcrops. The Peables Valley stretches from the ACTS clinic and divides the commercial farms from the Masoi area. Commercial farming in the broader area is predominately timber but fortunately along the valley there is no timber farming (this would pose a connectivity problem and impact line of sight requirements). The farmers as a community are already well connected (organisationally not in terms of Internet connectivity) with commando like structures in place because of crime.

The ACTS clinic is located at the beginning of the Valley. ACTS stands for AIDS Care Training and Support Clinic. They provide medical services to AIDS patients, councilling, testing and Anti-retroviral (ARV) treatment. The clinic has gained a reputation within the community with many people coming from outside of the Masoyi area for treatment. They are have been selected for managing ARV roleout because of their well developed councilling, testing and support group networks. Currently they have about 200 people on ARVs with this figure likely to grow to over 600. These treatements are being monitored by researchers at WITS University.

The Masoyi area runs along the right hand side of the valley. We identified approximately 10 schools, with two identified as being high schools with computer facilities. The project team has good links to a teacher in one of these schools who is in charge of the computer lab. In the area there is also a teachers training centre, government hospital and various government clinics in the area. The ACTS clinic runs a hospice close to one of the Government clinics.

== Situation in the Community ==

The community is underserviced. Most roads remain unpaved with the main road having been rebuilt after the floods of 2000. Electricity is available within the community.
The community is poor and has been hugely impacted by AIDS. Losing salaried member of households through AIDS has a bi impact on extended families. There is also the associated superstition and secretiveness around AIDS which does not help improve the situation.

== ACTS clinic ==

The clinic is a non-profit organisation established to provide AIDS care in the Masoyi area. It was initially sponsored by Glaxo Smithcline. The clinic has two doctors, an onsite hospice, training centre and accomodation for people on training courses.

A number of staff have been trained to provide pre-test and post-test councilling. This leaves the doctors free to focus on the medical aspects of treatment. The clinic operates in many ways like a private doctors practice. They charge consultation fees and patients on medical aid are charged accordingly. They however usually waive all fees as soon as it is established that a patient is suffering from AIDS. The clinic is relatively sopphisticated in their use of computers: they run practice management software, are connected to the Internet via Vsat for their research with WITS. They also have some custom MS Access based applications written internally to track patient statistics.

== Proposed Solution ==

Deploy a mesh network within the Peables Valley, run training courses to transfer skills on mesh setup and installation, work together with the clinic staff using Free Attitude Interviews (FAI) to discover applications and uses that work for the staff.

== What problem is being addressed ==

The main thrust is to connect the clinic to its community hospice and thus allow them to extend their computer facilities to the hospice (practise management software and statistics gathering). This is most easily achieved through a wireless network and more specifically a mesh because of the terrain.

A mesh network requires a number of nodes in areas not owned by the clinic but that are part of the commuity: schools and farmers. The main thrust of the research question is to implement the network in such a way that the firstly the clinic and secondly the community have taken ownership of the network. That they have created systems that ensure that the infrastructure is maintained and expanded by the users of the network.

== Technology Explained ==

A wireless network involves radios and arials. The radios broadcast and receive signals which are boosted and directed by the arials. Anyone with a radio can access the network. The spectrum used for Wifi required line-of-sight for connectivity. The routes between sites are also hard coded or manually adjusted in each device. This makes it technically difficult on two levels. Firstly, you need a deaper understanding or the radio spectrum and the operation of radio wave and secondly, configuration of the equipment requires a higher level of skill.

A mesh network uses the same infrastructure: aerials and radios. But at the network level it operated differently. The network simply requires that each node can see at least one other node (ie it can be part of the network) and that each node can send trafic to any node on the network (ie there are no islands which are not connected to the whole). In a mesh network this problem is solved at the software level. As long as your node can see another node it will be able to determine the routes to follow. The also allows for a level of self healing and thus less maintenance. If for example a truck parks in from of the node or a tree grows up over time and block the signal to another node then as long as the node can see an alternate node it can route traffic via this new path. On a conventional wireless network this would need to be manually configured.

The choice of mesh in the Peables Valley was made for these reasons:
Hilly terrain that requires a number of hops to reach the destination
Low skilled network operators
Changing conditions in the environment. Nodes that disappear through neglect, theft, obstruction.

== Social Challenges ==

There are a number of social challenges:

Firstly, for the the network to operate to serivice firstly the clinic and secondly the community it requires the cooperations of teachers in schools and of farmers. They all have there own agenda's there own perceptions of their expected level of involvment and their expectation of how aid is given to them.

In the school we are concerned about a hand-out mentality that will not see the school working hard to be involved in the extension of the mesh but simply being involved as long as it takes to link the school to the Internet. There is also the risk of our contact at the school wanting to be seen as being in charge and not wanting to work together with schools in the community.

To addess that we are looking at bringing the school pupils into the process from the beginning and teaching them how to install and configure equipment.

Secondly, with the farmers we are confident that it will be easy to sell them the concept of Internet connectivity. However, for the network to work for them will require that they connect to schools in the Masoyi area. We are not certain about the realtionship between these two groups. Considering the crime levels there is the risk that there is not a good level of trust.

Our strategy is to involve people from both groups during training workshops. Which at the very least would allow realtionships to be established.

Lastly, this is not the primary focus of the ACTS clinic so there will always be the risk that people are redeployed.

However, our main contact in the clinic is an electrical engineer by profession and the clinic itself has proved that they are a teaching organisation (their previous garder now runs the reception).

== Technical Challenges ==

Mesh networks are a new phenomena with the software sometimes not yet at the level required for the mesh to operate well. There is the risk that in this project we will discover the limitations of the technology and have to spend time compensating for that.

Some of the endpoint nodes we have identified require many hops. This requires many nodes. This is both a social and technical challenge. Social in that the project needs to bring each of those players on board and technical in that each of those nodes needs to be built, deployed and maintained.

There is also the risk of theft. The node equipment has very little commercial resale value in the community, although there seems to be wifi operating in the Nelspruit, White River area. However, that never seems to be a consideration of petty thieves. Hopefully deploying the equipment in established locations: schools, shops, private homes and not simply in the open will help secure the equipment.

== Equipment Ownership ==

As the objective is to create a community based network where the network is seen as a community asset so therefore some of the equipment at key nodes should belong to the community. Official ownership will be with the ACTS clinic until such time as a more formal structure for ownership of key mesh equipment can be established.

As the mesh grows individual node owners will own their own equipment. So a farmer or school will be the owner of that equipment and it will form part of the mesh. It is hoped that farmers will partner with institutions such as schools in which case the partners will define ownership relationships.

The project does not envision supplying any equipment to farmers unless they are located such that having equipment on their farm is critical to creating the mesh. In such as case we would look at funding that node if the project has to but the project will still attempt to have the farmer install his/her own equipment.

== Intellectual Property ==

The project will release all work under a suitable Open Source license. This work includes documentation and results of the research.

The project will not be developing any independent software but will be using other freely available mesh software. In the case that software is improved or modified it will be released under the license of the original software project to ensure that it can be included in future releases of that software.

== Sustainability ==

A key component to sustainability will be involvement of the farmers, Bible colleges, etc within the Peables Valley. The project will draw in the farmers for the following reasons: 1) they are a source of skills, 2) they have finances to pay for Internet connectivity and 3) that once they become users they are likely to become dependent on the mesh and thus ensure its ongoing success.

Part of the program will be to educate participants from the start so that they can extend the reach of the mesh. Included will be education of pupils from the partner schools. This education is designed to ensure that enough skills are available in the valley to repair nodes, setup new nodes, manage the mesh and train others.

A key component to the sustainability is that the project manager as the ACTS clinic is a qualified electrical engineer. We are therefore confident that it will not be difficult to educate him on the workings of the mesh network. He has already demonstrated his excitement and commitment to the project by spending a Saturday with the project leaders evaluating high sites. He is involved in training staff and is extremely practical so will be invaluable in erecting high sites.

== Pros and Cons of the system ==

First considering some positive aspects of the mesh. Firstly the clinic is already using IT infrastructure in the following areas: ARV monitoring, clinic management and accounts. Farmer, bible colleges, etc in the community already use the Internet for email etc but usually at great cost because of the limited choice of commectivity options. The partner schools already has a lab that has in the past been connected to the Internet. So there is already a body of people who have demonstrated the willingness or need to use the Internet who we feel would be willing the use a mesh if it provide always on and lower Internet connectivity costs.

The potential problems we see are the following. There is the risk that the effort to manage or be part of the mesh may be more expensive then direct connection especially in the case of the lack of good neighbourliness from any mesh participant. The clinic, although they currently use IT extensively, may in fact not need to extend that usage beyond the main clinic. The risk with the schools we feel is that there is a general hand-out mentality and that there will not be the will to learn, extend the network or integrate this into the curriculum. Another large risk is the sustainability of the network not from the mesh side but from the side of financing the hop onto the Internet itself.

== Backhaul Connectivity ==

The connectivity to ACTS is provided via Telkom VSAT. ACTS uses the connection as part of their involvement in ARV roleout for the Right To Care group. They have an Internet based application for capturing details of patients for monitoring and evaluating patients receiving ARVs

== Network Topology ==

[[Image:Acts meshnet.jpg]]

== News Flashes ==

== September 22, 2005, WiFi in the bush or the plot ==

Duane visited the IDRC funded workshop for WiFi in Africa. Sorry don't knwo what the real project name is. Sat in on the session on regulation, the Department of Communications delegates decided that this would be a good time to leave. Nice when you know you can't actually stand the heat.

Had a look at their cantenna based access-point liming over about 5km. With a Linksys strapped to a tree with... red tape... man we can't get away from red tape in this industry.

Most surprising was plot.net a local WISP that delivers Internet to about 100 customers and nobody new that they existed before booking the venue. They do long haul links to ADSL connections in Pretoria. Quite an innoative solution to high cost access. I want to explore that possibility in Peebles Valley.

== October 06, 2005 Wikipedia on the mesh ==

David and I visited the Peebles Mesh this week for two days and here is
a quick synopsis of events:

- We installed a firewall. This has software which should allow us to
control and cap bandwidth and it separates us from the clinic.
- We installed a local copy of Wikipedia. Still some bugs but very fast
- We can now access the site remotely

Big SURPRISE

Our cantennae was still operating! We did a data transfer from the
wireless box to ourselves. 3 hops I think at 192kB/s

First farmer online

We connected the chairman of the local farmers group to the Internet.
It was lovely we just watched and took notes. The farmers younger
brother had returned from the UK with a new laptop. We got that
connected. The first thing he asked is if he could download music - ho
hum :)

The sister of the farmer was also visiting and started giving her mother
a sales pitch about how they could talk to each other using skype for
free.

Was lovely to watch and we had boere kos but arrived a bit late for
lunch. We will ensure that doesn't happen again.

== July 06, 2005, Realisation of a mesh vision ==

Today we had a film crew filming the installation of a mesh node. It was great fun but they did waste our time a bit. Technically this is what we got done:

* Installed the node on Agnus' house permanately. Lassy did all this work
* Put a 3m pole at the Hospice to see if we can get over the ridge
* Upgraded AGNUS, HOSPICE and SIKILE to OpenWrt
* The clinic is cabling various buildings so we will be able to recover one node an just run a cable from the FLATS node to the VSAT.

We had a 7ms delay between AGNUS and ACTS_VSAT which is a route that passes through all present nodes. VoIP is now truely achievable. Wonderful performance compared to WDS mode. Throw out WDS wherever you see it its just not worth the effort. It is honestly more simple to setup OLSR. Glad we've learnt that and can move on.

We still ahve the following technical hurdles to overcome. The default route keeps disappearing. We need to install a proper firewall. Once that is done we can move onto the community adoption.

The day was full of some lovely experiences of the potential of what we are doing.

Once we had AGNUS up we setup Dave's laptop and had Agnus' daughter and a neighbour sit at the computer. Dave opened Google. They didn't know what to do. We asked them waht infomration they wanted to know. Stuck again. "Who is your favourite singer?" - Alicia Keys - "OK type that in the seach box, then click on search" - Shouts of glee as the search results return. "Now click here". Off they went to Alecia Keys home site and disappeared for about 10 minutes. Does that count as training? The two of them were sitting inside quite a dark house, they sat together on a sofa and the laptop screen glowed in the semi-dark with their face highlighted. This exact image was the vision I had for this project. So that made my day.

I did a quick training course in the dirt. Explaining what the differnt aerials did, how it all fitted together. And of course how to use a high-gain antenna as a fish braai. Lassy provided Swati translation as soon as there was any confusion.

Now off to the school to film students working on computers. They wanted to interview the teacher, who was a standin for Mr Sihlabela who we usualy work with. "What will you use the Internet for at your school", to which he replied, "I don't know". David did a quick exercise of taking the teacher, a history teacher, to Google. They Googled for "Shaka Zulu" and ended up at a very good site on the subject. "What will you use the Internet for at your school", and we got a 5 minute reply. Does that count as training?

What worked best about this trip was having a very focussed objective - get the mesh working. We didn't care about the firewall, the billing, shapping, etc. And we got it done. The next trips will be similarly techically focussed.

== July 05,2005 Moving on to OLSR ==

I left Peebles Valley at the end of May and this is the first return since then. David and I are migrating all the Linksys boxes from Sveasoft to OpenWrt, specifically the builds produced by Freifunk which has a nice web interface. Lassy has joined us again and is helping us move the equipment around.

The task involves loading the Freifunk firmware onto the box. This requires local connectivity. We still had connection problem until we discovered the ghosts of a WDS past. Alot of WDS settings were still on each of the boxes. We've now had to go and remove those especially the Lazy WDS mode settings which keep establishing bridges. OLSR looks like the right solution. Its the same amount of work as WDS setup but you get real routes, ones that you see and can traceroute through so you can actually see exactly how packets are being routed on the network. I'm much much happier. Yesterday we got USAID, ACTS_VSAT and ACTS_FLATS converted. Today we are in the field with a film crew and will migrate: AGNUS house, SIKILE_HIGH and FARM_COBUS. If we can get traffic from either Agnus' house or Cobus' farm then we know that the protocol is good, both these points would have to route through. SIKILE, USAID, ACTS_FLATS then ACTS_VSAT. WDS could never do that and if we can get this working then the mesh is good and we can move onto the next challenging problem.

At the last conservancy meeting at which ACTS clinic was present they mentioned the Mesh but all the farmers were wondering when exactly anything would happen. Hopefully we have a working system before we leave.

We also spoke to Frans Benz whose property is below USAID and he is still interested.

Of the nodes that we have observed all were powered up except ACTS_VSAT this was good as it means that people are leaving the equipment to do its job. THe VSAT was down because the plug is just too close to a useful double adapter.

We have brought 300m of CAT5 cable which the clinic will use to run cable from the VSat to the Flat so we can eliminate one node and use it elsewhere. This clinic has arranged conduit and pulling of the cables.

== February 19, 2005, Lessons learned from week long meshing ==

Lessons learnt

* Test test test: test devices in a known controlled environment. The box couldn't connect and we weren't sure exactly why.
* Use your own stuff: don't use other peoples stuff. We tried to use the alarm companies mast, it was rubbish and about to fall down. But it could also endanger our equipment when the alarm company removes there antennae.
* Equipment: cover for your laptop so you can see the screen. Backpack/fishing jacket also a head- mounted display wouldn't hurt (to monitor the wireless network). Rifle-mounted antennae with sight. Tri-pod for temporary mounting of equipment. Ladders are a problem you need a long extension ladder about 6m.
* Windows Sucks: we had major packet drop yet on Linux the network pings work perfectly. Either Windows has a simple and incompetant network layer or it puts so much rubbish on the network that it sucks up all bandwidth. Why do people use this rubbish!
* Testing protocol: It would be usefull to have a set standard of how you tackle problem. Many time you go down the wrong route. Simple idea: mount antennae with laptop and get signal strengths right. Then connect box browse to the box over the wire and check for links. Lastly connect to the box as a wireless client.

Observations on the first stage

The object of this exercise was for David and I to learn how to setup the equipment before involving the community. This objective has been met: the mesh functions well, we can monitor it and we can use it from any node.
Successes

We created a 4 node mesh that works and can connect to the Internet. Although we had issues these were just teething problem for the technicians and the hardware is really box-drop ready. This is really positive for a non-technical mesh community.

We met with the farmers and they now know what we are doing which give us easier access to their properties. The USAid couple were very helpful, very keen and are well known and liked in the community. We hope that this relationship and them being early users will help increase adoption within the farming community.

We validated that we can connect to the school through the USAid node. Although our contact at the school was on sick leave the principle made arrangements for another teacher to stay after school on Friday for almost 4 hours while we attempted to setup their node. We also noted the school now has a 15 seat computer lab.

The ACTS clinic staff were quite excited especially those that are volunteers from overseas. A number of ideas for the use of the network were put forward by the staff. These included using house bound AIDS patients to data capture for the clinic or simply to create new virtual relationships. Also suggested was using instant messaging as a form of anonymous counciling to allow school pupils to speak openly about AIDS.
Issues noted

Support! We have already got our first support call from people who use operating system that know better then you what they want to do. This is a source of potential problems as people will phone the clinic and overbuden an already busy staff. We need to investigate how the community can provide that support or busget to pay for such support.

Lightning! This is going to be a serious problem, there are solutions such as mast spikes that we need to install.

Power downs. The clinic powers off most of their equipment at night thus taking the gateway down. We need to look at way to keep this up. The conection also require human intervention and we need to investigate automation of this taks.

Network separation. The mesh is currently on the clinic network. The clinic does deal with sensitive data but also for security and management issues we need to seperate the neworks from each other.

Usage monitoring, charging. We need to begin monitoring and controlling usage so that we can explore charging models in the future.

Windows... it puts junk on the network. We need to look at simple firewall rules on the nodes to drop NetBEUI junk from the network.
Next steps

We will return to the site in a months time. At this time we wish to: separate the networks, install the school node, install a monitoring and access control system and announce a training course for the following month.

We will separate the networks by installing a new network card on the firewall. Most probably we will use NoCatAuth to control access to the network but need to investigate alternatives.

Other things to investigate are models for charging for network usage. Currently our strategy is to have farmers cross-subsidise the schools connectivity. A problem with this however is that other forms of connectivity are becoming relatively cheap (3G, etc) so this still needs to be reasonable.

== February 19, 2005, Too much sun for a geek ==

Day 4: Had steak at the conservancy meeting. Talked a little about the mesh - nobody understood what I was tgalking about... But getting cheap Internet sounded cool to them. The farmers have serious problem with Telk^h^h^h^h connectivity, phones, lightning, macadamia thieves, water, etc.

Day 5: Dave J works for a big parastatal like company which means he always comes late cause someone wants him to do something (he tells me he was fighting Jhb traffic to get more Linksys boxes. Mainly spent the morning getting ntop (a great network monitoring tool working) and got EtherApe (nice graphical monitoring tool) working. These are quite good for seeing how badly Windows abuses network resources.

Spent the afternoon with David at Sikhile High. Was pretty fruitless we couldn't work out if it was the box, antennae, or sun that was messing us around.

Day 6: Installed the USAid node properly. Took a long time and got really sunburned. Note to self need a ladder, suntan lotion, umbrella and LOTS of water. Installed a 90deg patch panel. We had major problems getting links to the clinic which was frustrating.

== February 17, 2005, More meshing ==

Day 3 cont...: Got USAid online, had been switched off not blown up by lightning. Phew. Installed a second mesh point which proved not to be needed. Worked out how to add parameters to the Kismet display, only worked out later that the signal strength bar graph is completely arbitrary. Will need to check all that again today. Installed an AP on the accomodation block, this seems a waste and we will probnably run cable from an AP installed on the staff flats instead.

Day 4: David J should be joining me today and we will be meeting with the farmers in the conservancy for a braai. I hope that we can raise the issue of what we are building and get people excited. Just before leaving yesterday I got everything up: I can ping all the other APs and can get out onto the net. I'll be checking this again remotely to see if I can get from USAid, to the clinic and out.

== February 16, 2005, Meshing ==

I've had a busy few days here in Peables Valley:

Day 1: Setup a linksys on the roof of the clinic. Found that we really can't see Petra from here or anywhere actually, Petra is a nice high point but all buildings are hidden behind a large rock. We installed one at a house belonging to consultants for USAid. This is a good site as we can see the staff flats from there but none of the other buildings. The problem with this is we now need to find a good spot at the clinic so that we can see USAid without using two APs at the clinic.

I visited the school, unfortunately Mr Sihlabela is off ill until March. I met with the principal and two other teachers and have agreed to visit on Friday with David. The school can see USAid but we still need to confirm the signal strength.

In discussions with various people I realised that lightning is going to be a serious problem. With all the equipment on an AP costing about R2,000 it can cripple a network if they have a serious strike.

Day 2: A frustrating day trying to get Kismet working. This involved creating a patched kernel to allow the orinoco driver to go into Monitor mode. Finding, downloading and compiling takes a long time. I did manage to get onto the clinic roof and confirm that we couldn't see a signal from USAid. We did get a signal from the staff flats.

In discussing uses for the network we had some new ideas:

* Getting house ridden patients a computer to get them communicating and getting outside virtually.
* Having the same patient do data capturing to bolster his income
* We also talked about using SMS and cellphones for compliance. Setting alarms for medicine taking. SMS messages that require a reply to check compliance. Notifying support group buddies about people not replying to SMS notification so that they can check that they're OK.

Day 3: Kismet is working! Not all the information is that useful for what I need to do. Met the clinic staff today to try and explain what we're doing. Today I'm checking signal strength from the school, its seems however that USAid is offline.

== February 11, 2005, Equipment got ==

We now have the equipment for the FMFI Wireless project in Mpumalanga. We have 10 Linksys wireless AP which we're firmware upgrading. The cards are in a nice heavy duty all weather box. A picture would be great :). All the boxes are being moded to do power over ethernet which makes hte whole installation clean and simple. Currently it looks like costs are around R2,000 a node.

I'm lugging the lot down to White River this weekend and will erect 3 of the nodes. Mainly to test equipment and get a working initial network. The other nodes will be setup by the community, following the Onno Purbo style of network deployment.

Mpumulanga Mesh

2006-01-04T16:04:52Z

Kilos: /* February 16, 2005, Meshing */

== Location ==

White River is a medium sized town about 20 minutes north of Nelspruit, the capital of Mpumalanga Province. Peables Valley and the Masoi Tribal land is located 20 minutes to the North East of White River along the road leading to the Kruger National Parks Numbi gate.

The area is hilly with some large granite outcrops. The Peables Valley stretches from the ACTS clinic and divides the commercial farms from the Masoi area. Commercial farming in the broader area is predominately timber but fortunately along the valley there is no timber farming (this would pose a connectivity problem and impact line of sight requirements). The farmers as a community are already well connected (organisationally not in terms of Internet connectivity) with commando like structures in place because of crime.

The ACTS clinic is located at the beginning of the Valley. ACTS stands for AIDS Care Training and Support Clinic. They provide medical services to AIDS patients, councilling, testing and Anti-retroviral (ARV) treatment. The clinic has gained a reputation within the community with many people coming from outside of the Masoyi area for treatment. They are have been selected for managing ARV roleout because of their well developed councilling, testing and support group networks. Currently they have about 200 people on ARVs with this figure likely to grow to over 600. These treatements are being monitored by researchers at WITS University.

The Masoyi area runs along the right hand side of the valley. We identified approximately 10 schools, with two identified as being high schools with computer facilities. The project team has good links to a teacher in one of these schools who is in charge of the computer lab. In the area there is also a teachers training centre, government hospital and various government clinics in the area. The ACTS clinic runs a hospice close to one of the Government clinics.

== Situation in the Community ==

The community is underserviced. Most roads remain unpaved with the main road having been rebuilt after the floods of 2000. Electricity is available within the community.
The community is poor and has been hugely impacted by AIDS. Losing salaried member of households through AIDS has a bi impact on extended families. There is also the associated superstition and secretiveness around AIDS which does not help improve the situation.

== ACTS clinic ==

The clinic is a non-profit organisation established to provide AIDS care in the Masoyi area. It was initially sponsored by Glaxo Smithcline. The clinic has two doctors, an onsite hospice, training centre and accomodation for people on training courses.

A number of staff have been trained to provide pre-test and post-test councilling. This leaves the doctors free to focus on the medical aspects of treatment. The clinic operates in many ways like a private doctors practice. They charge consultation fees and patients on medical aid are charged accordingly. They however usually waive all fees as soon as it is established that a patient is suffering from AIDS. The clinic is relatively sopphisticated in their use of computers: they run practice management software, are connected to the Internet via Vsat for their research with WITS. They also have some custom MS Access based applications written internally to track patient statistics.

== Proposed Solution ==

Deploy a mesh network within the Peables Valley, run training courses to transfer skills on mesh setup and installation, work together with the clinic staff using Free Attitude Interviews (FAI) to discover applications and uses that work for the staff.

== What problem is being addressed ==

The main thrust is to connect the clinic to its community hospice and thus allow them to extend their computer facilities to the hospice (practise management software and statistics gathering). This is most easily achieved through a wireless network and more specifically a mesh because of the terrain.

A mesh network requires a number of nodes in areas not owned by the clinic but that are part of the commuity: schools and farmers. The main thrust of the research question is to implement the network in such a way that the firstly the clinic and secondly the community have taken ownership of the network. That they have created systems that ensure that the infrastructure is maintained and expanded by the users of the network.

== Technology Explained ==

A wireless network involves radios and arials. The radios broadcast and receive signals which are boosted and directed by the arials. Anyone with a radio can access the network. The spectrum used for Wifi required line-of-sight for connectivity. The routes between sites are also hard coded or manually adjusted in each device. This makes it technically difficult on two levels. Firstly, you need a deaper understanding or the radio spectrum and the operation of radio wave and secondly, configuration of the equipment requires a higher level of skill.

A mesh network uses the same infrastructure: aerials and radios. But at the network level it operated differently. The network simply requires that each node can see at least one other node (ie it can be part of the network) and that each node can send trafic to any node on the network (ie there are no islands which are not connected to the whole). In a mesh network this problem is solved at the software level. As long as your node can see another node it will be able to determine the routes to follow. The also allows for a level of self healing and thus less maintenance. If for example a truck parks in from of the node or a tree grows up over time and block the signal to another node then as long as the node can see an alternate node it can route traffic via this new path. On a conventional wireless network this would need to be manually configured.

The choice of mesh in the Peables Valley was made for these reasons:
Hilly terrain that requires a number of hops to reach the destination
Low skilled network operators
Changing conditions in the environment. Nodes that disappear through neglect, theft, obstruction.

== Social Challenges ==

There are a number of social challenges:

Firstly, for the the network to operate to serivice firstly the clinic and secondly the community it requires the cooperations of teachers in schools and of farmers. They all have there own agenda's there own perceptions of their expected level of involvment and their expectation of how aid is given to them.

In the school we are concerned about a hand-out mentality that will not see the school working hard to be involved in the extension of the mesh but simply being involved as long as it takes to link the school to the Internet. There is also the risk of our contact at the school wanting to be seen as being in charge and not wanting to work together with schools in the community.

To addess that we are looking at bringing the school pupils into the process from the beginning and teaching them how to install and configure equipment.

Secondly, with the farmers we are confident that it will be easy to sell them the concept of Internet connectivity. However, for the network to work for them will require that they connect to schools in the Masoyi area. We are not certain about the realtionship between these two groups. Considering the crime levels there is the risk that there is not a good level of trust.

Our strategy is to involve people from both groups during training workshops. Which at the very least would allow realtionships to be established.

Lastly, this is not the primary focus of the ACTS clinic so there will always be the risk that people are redeployed.

However, our main contact in the clinic is an electrical engineer by profession and the clinic itself has proved that they are a teaching organisation (their previous garder now runs the reception).

== Technical Challenges ==

Mesh networks are a new phenomena with the software sometimes not yet at the level required for the mesh to operate well. There is the risk that in this project we will discover the limitations of the technology and have to spend time compensating for that.

Some of the endpoint nodes we have identified require many hops. This requires many nodes. This is both a social and technical challenge. Social in that the project needs to bring each of those players on board and technical in that each of those nodes needs to be built, deployed and maintained.

There is also the risk of theft. The node equipment has very little commercial resale value in the community, although there seems to be wifi operating in the Nelspruit, White River area. However, that never seems to be a consideration of petty thieves. Hopefully deploying the equipment in established locations: schools, shops, private homes and not simply in the open will help secure the equipment.

== Equipment Ownership ==

As the objective is to create a community based network where the network is seen as a community asset so therefore some of the equipment at key nodes should belong to the community. Official ownership will be with the ACTS clinic until such time as a more formal structure for ownership of key mesh equipment can be established.

As the mesh grows individual node owners will own their own equipment. So a farmer or school will be the owner of that equipment and it will form part of the mesh. It is hoped that farmers will partner with institutions such as schools in which case the partners will define ownership relationships.

The project does not envision supplying any equipment to farmers unless they are located such that having equipment on their farm is critical to creating the mesh. In such as case we would look at funding that node if the project has to but the project will still attempt to have the farmer install his/her own equipment.

== Intellectual Property ==

The project will release all work under a suitable Open Source license. This work includes documentation and results of the research.

The project will not be developing any independent software but will be using other freely available mesh software. In the case that software is improved or modified it will be released under the license of the original software project to ensure that it can be included in future releases of that software.

== Sustainability ==

A key component to sustainability will be involvement of the farmers, Bible colleges, etc within the Peables Valley. The project will draw in the farmers for the following reasons: 1) they are a source of skills, 2) they have finances to pay for Internet connectivity and 3) that once they become users they are likely to become dependent on the mesh and thus ensure its ongoing success.

Part of the program will be to educate participants from the start so that they can extend the reach of the mesh. Included will be education of pupils from the partner schools. This education is designed to ensure that enough skills are available in the valley to repair nodes, setup new nodes, manage the mesh and train others.

A key component to the sustainability is that the project manager as the ACTS clinic is a qualified electrical engineer. We are therefore confident that it will not be difficult to educate him on the workings of the mesh network. He has already demonstrated his excitement and commitment to the project by spending a Saturday with the project leaders evaluating high sites. He is involved in training staff and is extremely practical so will be invaluable in erecting high sites.

== Pros and Cons of the system ==

First considering some positive aspects of the mesh. Firstly the clinic is already using IT infrastructure in the following areas: ARV monitoring, clinic management and accounts. Farmer, bible colleges, etc in the community already use the Internet for email etc but usually at great cost because of the limited choice of commectivity options. The partner schools already has a lab that has in the past been connected to the Internet. So there is already a body of people who have demonstrated the willingness or need to use the Internet who we feel would be willing the use a mesh if it provide always on and lower Internet connectivity costs.

The potential problems we see are the following. There is the risk that the effort to manage or be part of the mesh may be more expensive then direct connection especially in the case of the lack of good neighbourliness from any mesh participant. The clinic, although they currently use IT extensively, may in fact not need to extend that usage beyond the main clinic. The risk with the schools we feel is that there is a general hand-out mentality and that there will not be the will to learn, extend the network or integrate this into the curriculum. Another large risk is the sustainability of the network not from the mesh side but from the side of financing the hop onto the Internet itself.

== Backhaul Connectivity ==

The connectivity to ACTS is provided via Telkom VSAT. ACTS uses the connection as part of their involvement in ARV roleout for the Right To Care group. They have an Internet based application for capturing details of patients for monitoring and evaluating patients receiving ARVs

== Network Topology ==

[[Image:Acts meshnet.jpg]]

== News Flashes ==

== September 22, 2005, WiFi in the bush or the plot ==

Duane visited the IDRC funded workshop for WiFi in Africa. Sorry don't knwo what the real project name is. Sat in on the session on regulation, the Department of Communications delegates decided that this would be a good time to leave. Nice when you know you can't actually stand the heat.

Had a look at their cantenna based access-point liming over about 5km. With a Linksys strapped to a tree with... red tape... man we can't get away from red tape in this industry.

Most surprising was plot.net a local WISP that delivers Internet to about 100 customers and nobody new that they existed before booking the venue. They do long haul links to ADSL connections in Pretoria. Quite an innoative solution to high cost access. I want to explore that possibility in Peebles Valley.

== October 06, 2005 Wikipedia on the mesh ==

David and I visited the Peebles Mesh this week for two days and here is
a quick synopsis of events:

- We installed a firewall. This has software which should allow us to
control and cap bandwidth and it separates us from the clinic.
- We installed a local copy of Wikipedia. Still some bugs but very fast
- We can now access the site remotely

Big SURPRISE

Our cantennae was still operating! We did a data transfer from the
wireless box to ourselves. 3 hops I think at 192kB/s

First farmer online

We connected the chairman of the local farmers group to the Internet.
It was lovely we just watched and took notes. The farmers younger
brother had returned from the UK with a new laptop. We got that
connected. The first thing he asked is if he could download music - ho
hum :)

The sister of the farmer was also visiting and started giving her mother
a sales pitch about how they could talk to each other using skype for
free.

Was lovely to watch and we had boere kos but arrived a bit late for
lunch. We will ensure that doesn't happen again.

== July 06, 2005, Realisation of a mesh vision ==

Today we had a film crew filming the installation of a mesh node. It was great fun but they did waste our time a bit. Technically this is what we got done:

* Installed the node on Agnus' house permanately. Lassy did all this work
* Put a 3m pole at the Hospice to see if we can get over the ridge
* Upgraded AGNUS, HOSPICE and SIKILE to OpenWrt
* The clinic is cabling various buildings so we will be able to recover one node an just run a cable from the FLATS node to the VSAT.

We had a 7ms delay between AGNUS and ACTS_VSAT which is a route that passes through all present nodes. VoIP is now truely achievable. Wonderful performance compared to WDS mode. Throw out WDS wherever you see it its just not worth the effort. It is honestly more simple to setup OLSR. Glad we've learnt that and can move on.

We still ahve the following technical hurdles to overcome. The default route keeps disappearing. We need to install a proper firewall. Once that is done we can move onto the community adoption.

The day was full of some lovely experiences of the potential of what we are doing.

Once we had AGNUS up we setup Dave's laptop and had Agnus' daughter and a neighbour sit at the computer. Dave opened Google. They didn't know what to do. We asked them waht infomration they wanted to know. Stuck again. "Who is your favourite singer?" - Alicia Keys - "OK type that in the seach box, then click on search" - Shouts of glee as the search results return. "Now click here". Off they went to Alecia Keys home site and disappeared for about 10 minutes. Does that count as training? The two of them were sitting inside quite a dark house, they sat together on a sofa and the laptop screen glowed in the semi-dark with their face highlighted. This exact image was the vision I had for this project. So that made my day.

I did a quick training course in the dirt. Explaining what the differnt aerials did, how it all fitted together. And of course how to use a high-gain antenna as a fish braai. Lassy provided Swati translation as soon as there was any confusion.

Now off to the school to film students working on computers. They wanted to interview the teacher, who was a standin for Mr Sihlabela who we usualy work with. "What will you use the Internet for at your school", to which he replied, "I don't know". David did a quick exercise of taking the teacher, a history teacher, to Google. They Googled for "Shaka Zulu" and ended up at a very good site on the subject. "What will you use the Internet for at your school", and we got a 5 minute reply. Does that count as training?

What worked best about this trip was having a very focussed objective - get the mesh working. We didn't care about the firewall, the billing, shapping, etc. And we got it done. The next trips will be similarly techically focussed.

== July 05,2005 Moving on to OLSR ==

I left Peebles Valley at the end of May and this is the first return since then. David and I are migrating all the Linksys boxes from Sveasfot to OpenWrt, specifically the builds produced by Freifunk which has a nice web interface. Lassy has joined us again and is helping us move the equipment around.

The task involves loading the Freifunk firmware onto the box. This requires local connectivity. We still had connection problem until we discovered the ghosts of a WDS past. Alot of WDS settings were still on each of the boxes. We've now had to go and remove those especially the Lazy WDS mode settings which keep establishing bridges. OLSR looks like the right solution. Its the same amount of work as WDS setup but you get real routes, ones that you see and can traceroute through so you can actually see exactly how packets are being routed on the network. I'm much much happier. Yesterday we got USAID, ACTS_VSAT and ACTS_FLATS converted. Today we are in the field with a film crew and will migrate: AGNUS house, SIKILE_HIGH and FARM_COBUS. If we can get traffic from either Agnus' house or Cobus' farm then we know that the protocol is good, both these points would have to route through. SIKILE, USAID, ACTS_FLATS then ACTS_VSAT. WDS could never do that and if we can get this working then the mesh is good and we can move onto the next challenging problem.

At the last conservanc meeting at which ACTS slinic was present they mentioned the Mesh but all the famers were wondering when exactly anythin would happen. Hopefully we have a working system before we leave.

We also spoke to Frans Benz whose property is below USAID and he is still interested.

Of the nodes that we have observed all were powered up except ACTS_VSAT this was good as it means that people are leaving the equipment to do its job. THe VSAT was down because the plug is just too close to a usefull double adapter.

We have brought 300m of CAT5 cable which the clinic will use to run cable from the VSat to the Flat so we can eliminate one node and use it elsewhere. This clinic has arranged conduit and pulling of the cables.

== February 19, 2005, Lessons learned from week long meshing ==

Lessons learnt

* Test test test: test devices in a known controlled environment. The box couldn't connect and we weren't sure exactly why.
* Use your own stuff: don't use other peoples stuff. We tried to use the alarm companies mast, it was rubbish and about to fall down. But it could also endanger our equipment when the alarm company removes there antennae.
* Equipment: cover for your laptop so you can see the screen. Backpack/fishing jacket also a head- mounted display wouldn't hurt (to monitor the wireless network). Rifle-mounted antennae with sight. Tri-pod for temporary mounting of equipment. Ladders are a problem you need a long extension ladder about 6m.
* Windows Sucks: we had major packet drop yet on Linux the network pings work perfectly. Either Windows has a simple and incompetant network layer or it puts so much rubbish on the network that it sucks up all bandwidth. Why do people use this rubbish!
* Testing protocol: It would be usefull to have a set standard of how you tackle problem. Many time you go down the wrong route. Simple idea: mount antennae with laptop and get signal strengths right. Then connect box browse to the box over the wire and check for links. Lastly connect to the box as a wireless client.

Observations on the first stage

The object of this exercise was for David and I to learn how to setup the equipment before involving the community. This objective has been met: the mesh functions well, we can monitor it and we can use it from any node.
Successes

We created a 4 node mesh that works and can connect to the Internet. Although we had issues these were just teething problem for the technicians and the hardware is really box-drop ready. This is really positive for a non-technical mesh community.

We met with the farmers and they now know what we are doing which give us easier access to their properties. The USAid couple were very helpful, very keen and are well known and liked in the community. We hope that this relationship and them being early users will help increase adoption within the farming community.

We validated that we can connect to the school through the USAid node. Although our contact at the school was on sick leave the principle made arrangements for another teacher to stay after school on Friday for almost 4 hours while we attempted to setup their node. We also noted the school now has a 15 seat computer lab.

The ACTS clinic staff were quite excited especially those that are volunteers from overseas. A number of ideas for the use of the network were put forward by the staff. These included using house bound AIDS patients to data capture for the clinic or simply to create new virtual relationships. Also suggested was using instant messaging as a form of anonymous counciling to allow school pupils to speak openly about AIDS.
Issues noted

Support! We have already got our first support call from people who use operating system that know better then you what they want to do. This is a source of potential problems as people will phone the clinic and overbuden an already busy staff. We need to investigate how the community can provide that support or busget to pay for such support.

Lightning! This is going to be a serious problem, there are solutions such as mast spikes that we need to install.

Power downs. The clinic powers off most of their equipment at night thus taking the gateway down. We need to look at way to keep this up. The conection also require human intervention and we need to investigate automation of this taks.

Network separation. The mesh is currently on the clinic network. The clinic does deal with sensitive data but also for security and management issues we need to seperate the neworks from each other.

Usage monitoring, charging. We need to begin monitoring and controlling usage so that we can explore charging models in the future.

Windows... it puts junk on the network. We need to look at simple firewall rules on the nodes to drop NetBEUI junk from the network.
Next steps

We will return to the site in a months time. At this time we wish to: separate the networks, install the school node, install a monitoring and access control system and announce a training course for the following month.

We will separate the networks by installing a new network card on the firewall. Most probably we will use NoCatAuth to control access to the network but need to investigate alternatives.

Other things to investigate are models for charging for network usage. Currently our strategy is to have farmers cross-subsidise the schools connectivity. A problem with this however is that other forms of connectivity are becoming relatively cheap (3G, etc) so this still needs to be reasonable.

== February 19, 2005, Too much sun for a geek ==

Day 4: Had steak at the conservancy meeting. Talked a little about the mesh - nobody understood what I was tgalking about... But getting cheap Internet sounded cool to them. The farmers have serious problem with Telk^h^h^h^h connectivity, phones, lightning, macadamia thieves, water, etc.

Day 5: Dave J works for a big parastatal like company which means he always comes late cause someone wants him to do something (he tells me he was fighting Jhb traffic to get more Linksys boxes. Mainly spent the morning getting ntop (a great network monitoring tool working) and got EtherApe (nice graphical monitoring tool) working. These are quite good for seeing how badly Windows abuses network resources.

Spent the afternoon with David at Sikhile High. Was pretty fruitless we couldn't work out if it was the box, antennae, or sun that was messing us around.

Day 6: Installed the USAid node properly. Took a long time and got really sunburned. Note to self need a ladder, suntan lotion, umbrella and LOTS of water. Installed a 90deg patch panel. We had major problems getting links to the clinic which was frustrating.

== February 17, 2005, More meshing ==

Day 3 cont...: Got USAid online, had been switched off not blown up by lightning. Phew. Installed a second mesh point which proved not to be needed. Worked out how to add parameters to the Kismet display, only worked out later that the signal strength bar graph is completely arbitrary. Will need to check all that again today. Installed an AP on the accomodation block, this seems a waste and we will probnably run cable from an AP installed on the staff flats instead.

Day 4: David J should be joining me today and we will be meeting with the farmers in the conservancy for a braai. I hope that we can raise the issue of what we are building and get people excited. Just before leaving yesterday I got everything up: I can ping all the other APs and can get out onto the net. I'll be checking this again remotely to see if I can get from USAid, to the clinic and out.

== February 16, 2005, Meshing ==

I've had a busy few days here in Peables Valley:

Day 1: Setup a linksys on the roof of the clinic. Found that we really can't see Petra from here or anywhere actually, Petra is a nice high point but all buildings are hidden behind a large rock. We installed one at a house belonging to consultants for USAid. This is a good site as we can see the staff flats from there but none of the other buildings. The problem with this is we now need to find a good spot at the clinic so that we can see USAid without using two APs at the clinic.

I visited the school, unfortunately Mr Sihlabela is off ill until March. I met with the principal and two other teachers and have agreed to visit on Friday with David. The school can see USAid but we still need to confirm the signal strength.

In discussions with various people I realised that lightning is going to be a serious problem. With all the equipment on an AP costing about R2,000 it can cripple a network if they have a serious strike.

Day 2: A frustrating day trying to get Kismet working. This involved creating a patched kernel to allow the orinoco driver to go into Monitor mode. Finding, downloading and compiling takes a long time. I did manage to get onto the clinic roof and confirm that we couldn't see a signal from USAid. We did get a signal from the staff flats.

In discussing uses for the network we had some new ideas:

* Getting house ridden patients a computer to get them communicating and getting outside virtually.
* Having the same patient do data capturing to bolster his income
* We also talked about using SMS and cellphones for compliance. Setting alarms for medicine taking. SMS messages that require a reply to check compliance. Notifying support group buddies about people not replying to SMS notification so that they can check that they're OK.

Day 3: Kismet is working! Not all the information is that useful for what I need to do. Met the clinic staff today to try and explain what we're doing. Today I'm checking signal strength from the school, its seems however that USAid is offline.

== February 11, 2005, Equipment got ==

We now have the equipment for the FMFI Wireless project in Mpumalanga. We have 10 Linksys wireless AP which we're firmware upgrading. The cards are in a nice heavy duty all weather box. A picture would be great :). All the boxes are being moded to do power over ethernet which makes hte whole installation clean and simple. Currently it looks like costs are around R2,000 a node.

I'm lugging the lot down to White River this weekend and will erect 3 of the nodes. Mainly to test equipment and get a working initial network. The other nodes will be setup by the community, following the Onno Purbo style of network deployment.

HowTos

2005-12-25T20:47:29Z

Kilos:

=Getting started=

==1. Check who you can connect to:==
Your very first step is to find your current position on a map and then see what other wireless nodes are nearby. The best way to do this is to get a GPS and find out your coordinates and then to enter these into [http://earth.google.com/ google earth] - you can also use google earth to find your coordinates by idetifying your house on the satellite image. Once you have entered your google earth position

==2. Check the distance between you and the next hop in the mesh==

==3. Build a mesh node==

==4. Install latest mesh networking firmware==

==5. Install mesh node==

==6. Setup mesh configuration==

==7. Start surfing==

=HowTo Build your own mesh node=
==Step 1: Analyse your situation==
You need to know who/what you intend connecting to and a rough idea of how far and in what direction they are to you. You can use tools such as NodeDB or Google Earth to get an idea.

==Step 2: Get Equipment==
In order to join a mesh network you will need the following:
A mesh network node consists of a wireless router, antenna, routing software and settings.

===[[Wireless Router]]===
Your wireless router can either be a PC with a wireless card, a dedicated [[Wireless Router]] unit or [[SBC]] Single Board Computer with a wireless card. A dedicated [[Wireless Router]] is the most popular choice because it is relatively cheap, easy to configure and low power making it practicle for a device that is meant to be on most of the time.

[[Wireless Router]] (e.g. Linksys [[WRT54G]]) suppliers:

Fill in

===Antennae:===

The first step is to select an antenna that suits your situation best. There are several types of Antennae:
1) [[Omnidirectional]]
2) [[Yagi-Uda]]
3) [[Grid]]
4) [[Flat-panel]]
5) [[Wave-guide]]

The main difference between these antennae is the [[Radiation Pattern]]. Each type is also available with different [[Gain]] specifications.
Typical [[Wireless Router]]s are sold with 2 omnidirectional antennae and these can be re-used as part of your node, depending on your situation. If you have other nodes in your vicinity that are spread out in all directions but are fairly close (i.e. < 3Km), then an omni-directional antenna should suffice. If the other nodes are concentrated in one direction, for example, if you have a hill on one side of your house and theres no point in radiating the hill, then you may want to choose a more directional antenna, like a 180 degree [[Flat-panel]]. For point-to-point links, a smaller radiation angle is needed and [[Grid]] or [[Yagi-Uda]] type antennae are probably best suited.

Antennae can be bought or home-made if you need to save costs (see [[Home-Brew Antennae]]).

Antenna suppliers:

Fill in

===Other:===
You will also require other equipment to install your node, depending on your location:

1. Cables: Rf and UTP cable
2. POE convertors, Buy or make your own (see [[Home-Brew POE]])
3. Pole and brackets

==Step 3: Install Software/Firmware==
The type of software that needs to be installed will typically be implmentations of mesh routing protocols like [[OLSR]], as well as security software, like VPN clients. On dedicated wireless routers, this is typically implemented on Firmware, while on standard PC's its implemented in Software.

===[[WRT54G]] Firmware update===
[[Wireless Router]]s like the [[WRT54G]] are not mesh capable as is. One of the reasons for selecting the Linksys is that the Firmware is upgradeable.

'''Caution: ''' Please note, that fiddling with the firmware will void your warranty!!!

The following instructions apply to networks running the OLSR routing protocl, like the [[Pretoria Mesh]].

1. Download freifunk firmware from [http://www.freifunk.net/wiki/FreifunkFirmwareEnglish Freifunk site] or [ftp://comgingsoon Local]

2. Set boot wait on linksys

Web method:

Navigate to web page were you can send pings and type each of these lines one line at a time

;cp${IFS}*/*/nvram${IFS}/tmp/n
;*/n${IFS}set${IFS}boot_wait=on
;*/n${IFS}commit
;*/n${IFS}show>tmp/ping.log

NVRAM method:

telnet into box and type the following

nvram set boot_wait=on
nvram commit
reboot

3. Upload firmware

Give yourself a fixed IP in the 192.168.1.x range e.g. 192.168.1.100

Use tftp to upload firmware

tftp 192.168.1.1
tftp> binary
tftp> rexmt 1
tftp> trace
Packet tracing on.
tftp> put openwrt-g-freifunk-1.0.2-en.bin

Wait for the power light to stop flashing
Power cycle the box

4. Check that the web interface is working. Visit the site http://192.168.1.1 on your web browser - you should see the main freifunk web interface appear

5. Set up the wireless interface

WLAN protocol: Static
Ip Address: 192.168.2.5
Netmask: 255.255.255.0
WLAN Mode: Ad Hoc (Peer to Peer)
ESSID: mesh
Channel: 6
TX Power: 100

6. Set up the LAN interface

LAN protocol: Static
LAN IP: 192.168.4.1
LAN Netmask: 255.255.255.0
Disable NAT: yes
Disable Firewall: yes

7. Set up the WAN interface

WAN Protocol: DHCP
Host name: Lawrence

8. Set up OLSR

HNA4: 192.168.4.1 255.255.255.0

9. Restart the Linksys

You should now be given an IP address in the 192.168.3.x range
You should be able to connect to another mesh access point and even get a default gateway to an internet point, if one exists

==Step 4: Assemble the equipment==
===HowTo Water-proof your equipment===

==Step 5: Install the Equipment==

[[Image:Usb-wireless-final.jpg|thumb]]
[[Image:Wireless-router-outdoor1.jpg|thumb]]

==Step 6: Troubleshoot==
Start with Layer 1:
Is everything switched on?
Is the LAN plugged in?
Is the Antenna connected?
Is it facing the right direction?
Is it polarised correctly?

Check software settings:
Is the correct antenna selected?
Is the routing daemon running?

=[[WRT54G]] HowTos=
==HowTo create an ipk package==

TOOLS

Get the script rightfully called ipkg-build at, among other places, ftp://ftp.handhelds.org/packages/ipkg-utils, or http://www.mizi.com/download/mz20/ipkg-build.

CREATING THE PACKAGE STRUCTURE

Say you wanna create a package called MyPackage; you further wanna package the project called MyProject. Then do the following:

1. Create a directory called MyPackage.
2. Inside directory MyPackage, create a directory called CONTROL.
3. Copy your project (MyProject) to the MyPackage directory.
4. Inside directory CONTORL creating a file called control.

NOTE:

When the package is installed on the target, the MyPAckage directory will be created with respect to root. So if you wanted your files to be installed in /usr/bin on the target system, then our project would in this case be “/usr/bin”. That is you create inside directory MyPackage a directory called /usr/bin.

FORMAT AND CONTENTS OF /CONTROL/control

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Package: MyPackage

Priority: optional // default

Version: 1.0 //package version

Architecture: mipsel

Maintainer: I_maintain@you.com

Source: ftp:ftp:122.122.122.122 //See Note below

Section: misc //See Note below

Description: This is an attempt to create ipkg.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NOTE:

The fields Section and Source seem rather useless to me in this example and I initially left them out; however the ipkg-build script complained requiring them, so I just put them in as a workaround without knowing/”caring” of their need. There are other fields not included here which you might need for your purposes, check the web for more.

Further the comments are mine for this documentation purposes only and the script MIGHT NOT permit comments.

RUNNING THE ipkg-build SCRIPT

Now simply run (of course being outside of the directory MyPackage):

“./ipkg-build –c –o root –g root MyPackage” // as root or non-root, or

“./ipkg-build –c MyPackage” //as root

IF all’s well, a package on the current directory will be created.

NOTE:

Without the “-c” option, I could not get the package installed successfully, you can try with or without and see for yourself.

==HowTo run Kismet on a WRT54G==

*Install either the kismet or kismet_drone package.
*Edit /etc/kismet_drone.conf and change the source from wrt54g,eth1,wrt45g to wrt54g,prism0,wrt54g.
*Run kismet from your host, pc and off u go!

==HowTo check your Linksys WRT54G version==
Finally some good info about finding the version number from outside markings and using NVRAM settings - info from www.openwrt.org

Linksys WRT54G

1. Hardware versions
1. Identification by S/N
1. WRT54G v1.0
2. WRT54G v1.1
3. WRT54G v2.0
4. WRT54G v2.2
5. WRT54G v3.0 & WRT54G v3.1
6. WRT54G v4.00
2. Table summary
3. Hardware hacking

1. Hardware versions

There are currently seven versions of the WRT54G (v1.0, v1.1, v2.0, v2.2, v3.0, v3.1, v4.00). With the exception of v4.00 devices (it is currently marked as untested for White Russian RC1), the WRT54G units are supported by OpenWrt 1.0 (White Russian) and later. boot_wait is off by default on these routers, so you should turn it on. The version number is found on the label on the bottom of the front part of the case below the Linksys logo.
1.0.1. Identification by S/N

Useful for identifying shrinkwrapped units. The S/N can be found on the box, below the UPC barcode.

(!) Please contribute to this list. (!)

{| style="width:400px; height:200px" border="1"
|-
| Model
| S/N
| CVS
| EXP
|- style="height:100px"
| WRT54G v1.1
| CDF20xxxxxxx CDF30xxxxxxx
| (./)
| (./)
|-
| WRT54G v2
| CDF50xxxxxxx
| (./)
| (./)
|-
| WRT54G v2.2
| CDF70xxxxxxx
| {X}
| (./)
|-
| WRT54G v3
| CDF80xxxxxxx
| {X}
| (./)
|-
| WRT54G v3.1 (AU?)
| CDF90xxxxxxx
| {X}
| (./)
|}

1.1. WRT54G v1.0

The WRT54G v1.0 is based on the Broadcom 4710 board. It has a 125MHz CPU, 4Mb flash and 16Mb SDRAM. The wireless NIC is a mini-PCI card. The switch is an ADM6996.
1.2. WRT54G v1.1

The WRT54G v1.1 is based on the Broadcom 4710 board. It has a 125MHz CPU, 4Mb flash and 16Mb SDRAM. The wireless NIC is soldered to the board. The switch is an ADM6996.

Hardware informations (nvram) :

boardtype=bcm94710dev

1.3. WRT54G v2.0

The WRT54G v2.0 is based on the Broadcom 4712 board. It has a 200MHz CPU, 4Mb flash and 16Mb SDRAM. The wireless NIC is integrated to the board. The switch is an ADM6996.

Hardware informations (nvram) :

boardtype=0x0101
boardflags=0x0188

1.4. WRT54G v2.2

The WRT54G v2.2 is based on the Broadcom 4712 board. It has a 200MHz CPU, 4Mb flash and 16Mb DDR-SDRAM. The wireless NIC is integrated to the board. The switch is a BCM5325.

Hardware informations (nvram) :

boardtype=0x0708
boardflags=0x0118

1.5. WRT54G v3.0 & WRT54G v3.1

This unit is just like the V2.2 Except it has an extra reboot button on the left front panel behind a Cisco logo.
1.6. WRT54G v4.00

Please add information for this revision.

Hardware informations (nvram) :

boardrev=0x10
boardtype=0x0708
boardflags2=0
boardflags=0x0118
boardnum=42

/!\ To take the front cover off of this unit you must first remove the small screws under the rubber covers of the front feet!
2. Table summary

how to get info :

* board info: nvram show | grep board | sort
* cpu model: cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep cpu

{| style="width:400px; height:200px" border="1"
|-
|Model
|boardrev
|boardtype
|boardflags
|boardflags2
|boardnum
|wl0_corerev
|cpu model
|-
|WRT54G v1.1
|
|bcm94710dev
|
|
|42
|5
|BCM4710 V0.0
|-
|WRT54G v2.0
|
|0x0101
|0x0188
|
|
|
|BCM3302 V0.7
|-
|WRT54G v2.2
|
|0x0708
|0x0118
|
|
|7
|
|-
|WRT54G v3.0
|0x10
|0x0708
|0x0118
|0
|42
|7
|BCM3302 V0.7
|-
|WRT54G v3.1 (AU?)
|0x10
|0x0708
|0x0118
|0
|42
|7
|BCM3302 V0.7
|-
|WRT54G v4.0
|0x10
|0x0708
|0x0118
|0
|42
|7
|BCM3302 V0.7
|-
|WRT54GS v1.0
|0x10
|0x0101
|0x0388
|0
|42
|7
|BCM3302 V0.7
|-
|WRT54GS v1.1
|0x10
|0x0708
|0x0318
|0
|42
|
|
|-
|Buffalo WBR-54G
|0x10
|bcm94710ap
|0x0188
|2
|42
|
|
|-
|Toshiba WRC1000
|
|bcm94710r4
|
|
|100
|
|
|-
|Buffalo WBR2-G54S
|0x10
|0x0101
|0x0188
|0
|00
|
|
|-
|Asus WL-500G Deluxe
|0x10
|bcm95365r
|
|
|45
|5
|BCM3302 V0.7
|-
|}

*other variables (nvram) of interest : boot_ver, pmon_ver, firmware_version, os_version

please complete this table. Look at this thread : [WWW] http://openwrt.org/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=8127#p8127 May be this table should move up to OpenWrtDocs/Hardware.
3. Hardware hacking

There are revision XH units of the WRT54G v2.0. These units have 32Mb of memory, but they are locked to 16Mb. You can unlock the remaining memory with changing some of the variables. Afterburner (aka. Speedbooster) mode can be enabled with some variables, too.

/!\ However, there are no guaranties, that these will work, and changing the memory configuration on a non-XH unit will give You a brick. Check the forums for more info.
If you have a look at the WRT54G v2.2 board, you can find on the left corner, near the power LED, an empty place for a 4 pins button. On the board it is printed as SW2. This is the second reset button you can find on WRT54G v3.0, except that it has not been soldered.

==HowTo Stabilise a ver 2.2 [[WRT54G]] running OpenWRT based firmware==
After a lot of tweaking OLSR running on Linksys has had no "ping down" messages for about 5 days now. Some of the tips to getting OLSR on OpenWRT stable.

1. Lock all the nodes to 802.11B don't let it auto sense
2. If there are any v2.2 hardware devices, change the clock speed to 216MHz with the following commands1

# nvram set clkfreq=216
# nvram commit
# reboot

3. Lock the RX and TX antenna to the one you connected your external antenna too, don't use AUTO. TAKE NOTE!!! On Version 2.0 hardware Antenna A is on the left looking from the front of the linksys and and on Version 2.,2 hardware Antenna A is on the right looking from the fron of the linksys. This caught me out a few times.

==HowTo configure netmasks on OLSR/Freifunk==
I had this problem with the OLSR web interface on the Freifunk openwrt implementation. If entered the following for the HNA4 field

HNA4: 10.3.13.1 255.255.255.0

Which should advertise the whole 10.3.13.x net it would advertise the 10.0.0.0 net. I discovered that it needs the subnet mask in this format instead

HNA4: 10.3.13.1/24

A few other things I learnt

1. NVRAM variable ff_hna4 stores the HNA4 setting
2. /etc/olsr.conf is ignored by freifunk
3. /rom/etc/olsrd.conf stores a permanent copy of the olsrd setup
4. /var/etc/olsrd.conf is a symbolic link to /tmp/etc/olsrd.conf ... this file is copied from /rom/etc/olsrd.conf into RAM (ramfs filesystem) and is the one called by olsrd.

ps -A will reveal that olsrd is called as follows

olsrd -f /var/etc/olsrd.conf -d 0

==HowTo Brick and De-Brick a WRT54G==
Theres nothing like learning the hard way! As a result of my usual "If it ain't broke, it hasn't been fixed enough" approach to life, I fiddled with the Linksys until it innevitably went into a coma/ vegetative state. How did I manage this you ask? Simple, I started by doing a firmware upgrade using the wrong sveasoft image, which resulted in a moderately upset linksys which refused to talk to me on the web interface. With the help of our trusted Android (Andrew), I managed to do a reset-hold/ ping / tftp recovery and then flashed the poor bugger with OpenWRT, which according to OpenWRT is still not supported by them for the version 2.2 Linksys, which I subsequently found out I was using! So alas, all that remained was a perfectly dead Linksys, not responding to anything. It was time to go in, screwdrivers a blazing. I shorted out pins 15 and 16 and started up the Linksys, this created a crc error which was detected on boot, this then started up an emergency TFTP server which allowed me to ping and finally tftp the original Linksys firmware back onto it!

More details on the recovery processes can be found here:
[http://openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs/Troubleshooting OpenWrtDocs/Troubleshooting - OpenWrt]

Whew!

==How to set up Linksys as a RIP2 router with client mode==

How to set up Linksys as a RIP2 router with client mode

1. Load Alchemy pre-release 5.2.3 onto the linksys

2. Set the Linksys Wireless interface to Client mode and set SSID to "pta-mesh"

Using the web interface select Wireless - Basic Settings
Wireless Mode : Client
SSID: pta-mesh
Select Save Settings - continue

3. Choose your IP addresses for the Wireless interface and the LAN interface

I chose the following
WAN interface: 10.50.1.13
LAN interface: 10.3.11.1

Using the Web interface select Setup - Basic Setup
Internet Connection Type: Static IP
Internet IP Address: 10.50.1.13
Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
Router Name: Something you like eg. david_home
Local IP Address: 10.3.11.1
Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0

Select Save Settings - continue

4. Add router configuration files to the target directory

Enter the router directory ($LINKSYS/src/router)
# cd /mipsel-uclibc/target
# mkdir /usr/local
# mkdir /usr/local/etc

Download my RIP configuration files for linksys
ripd.conf
zebra.conf

Copy these files to $LINKSYS/src/router/mipsel-uclibc/target/usr/local/etc

Download my image making script which will build files in the code.bin image
makeimage.sh

Copy this script to $LINKSYS/src/router
Run the script
./makeimage.sh

You should now have a code.bin with the router config files in /usr/local/etc
Upload this new firmware to the linksys

5. Add commands to rc_startup to startup RIP, Flush iptables (so that RIP messages can arrive on RIP port) and remove NAT

zebra -d -f /usr/local/etc/zebra.conf
ripd -d -f /usr/local/etc/ripd.conf
iptables -F
iptables -F -t nat

8. You should now have a rip enabled linksys client - Try ping the network connected to the wireless interface from a machine connected to the LAN

Things to improve in this recipe
1. Don't flush all iptables - just enable the port for RIP routing
2. Find location in Makefile where the code.bin image is made - don't need my custom script

==HowTo route between WLAN and LAN on a WRT54G with Sveasoft==
Make sure you have installed Sveasoft Alchemy 5.2.4

Go to Administration - Diagnostics and enter the following into the command line
brctl delif br0 eth1
ifconfig eth1 down
ifconfig eth1 up
if addr add 192.168.2.1/24 dev eth1

Click on "save startup"
Reboot linksys

This will create a new subnet for the wireless side of the router on the 192.168.2.0 network
The LAN side of the router will remain on the 192.168.1.0 network

==HowTo Cross compile for the WRT54G==
Got a c++ program compiled for linksys

The C++ environment is configured!

1.Download the linksys firmware source
2. Copy the brcm/ directory from /tools to /opt
3. add /opt/brcm/hndtools-mipsel-linux/bin to your path
4. add /opt/brcm/hndtools-mipsel-uclibc/bin to your path

Use mipsel-linux-g++ compiler to compile any c++ code
Don't use the mipsel-uclibc-g++ compiler - this was my mistake!
Now we can try compile mobile mesh for linksys

=HowTo create/be part of a VPN=
Establishing IPsec tunnel/connection between FreeBSD and Linux (openswan IPsec Cisco WRT54G Router)

Establishing IPsec tunnel/connection between FreeBSD and Linux (openswan IPsec Cisco WRT54G Router)

Below is a simple setup demonstrating steps to establish an IPsec connection/tunnel between two machines one running Ipsec/racoon (on FreeBSD) and the other running openswan Ipsec (on WRT54G running Linux) using pre-shared key: This IPsec setup example shows how to control the Private LAN_A (146.64.0.0) network access.

.........(INTERNET)

.........|

.........|

..| FreeBSD | ......10.50.1.3..............................10.50.1.80| Openswan IPsec|

.| Router_A |<========> (“NETWORK”)<=======>| Router_B |

.| 146.64.17.1 |................................................................| 10.1.13.1 |

............ ||.........................................................................||

...Private LAN_A....................................................PPrivate LAN_B

...........|.......................................................................................|...........
....Client_A (146.64.17.12) ..................................Client_B (10.1.13.130)

NOTE: Before running racoon/ipsec and openswan ipsec, ensure that all nodes can successfully reach (ping) each other.

INSTALLING OPENSWAN ON WRT54G

To install, add the following to /etc/ipkg.conf:

src openswan ftp://ftp.openswan.org/openswan/binaries/openwrt/buildroot-20040509/ipkg/

and then run:

ipkg update

ipkg install gmp mawk openswan-module openswan

NOTE: Since /etc/ipkg.conf would normally be a link to the file in /rom directory; You can simple delete the link, and then copy the file over.

CONFIGURATION (Router_A IPsec)

There are three (3) configuration files on Router_A that needs to be edited: ipsec.conf (found in /etc on FreeBSD), psk.conf.(found in /usr/local/etc/racoon/ on FreeBSD) and racoon.conf.(found in /usr/local/etc/racoon/ on FreeBSD).

Add the following two lines in ipsec.conf: (This file defines the ends points of the tunnel to be established. There’d be two lines for each LAN_B client )

spdadd 146.64.0.0/16 10.1.13.0/24 any -P out ipsec esp/tunnel/10.50.1.3-10.50.1.80/require;

spdadd 10.1.13.0/24 146.64.0.0/16 any -P in ipsec esp/tunnel/10.50.1.80-10.50.1.3/require;

Roughly; the first line says “traffic coming from 146.64.0.0 network destined for 10.1.13.0 network must be transported via an IPsec tunnel with local endpoint 10.50.1.3 and far endpoint 10.50.1.80”.

The second line says “traffic coming from 10.1.13.0 network destined for 146.64.0.0 network must/would use an IPsec tunnel with a far endpoint 10.50.1.80 and local endpoint 10.50.1.3”.

Add the following line to psk.conf (This file defines the pre-shared key to be used between Router_A and Router_B).

10.50.1.80 presharedkey

NOTE: Comments must be on a different line to the pre-shared key entry, otherwise the comments are interpreted as part of the pre-shared key.

Add the following lines to racoon.conf

path pre_shared_key "/usr/local/etc/racoon/psk.txt" ;

remote anonymous

{

# exchange_mode aggressive,main ;

exchange_mode main ;

lifetime time 24 hour ;

proposal {

encryption_algorithm 3des ;

hash_algorithm sha1;

authentication_method pre_shared_key ;

dh_group 2 ;

}

}

sainfo anonymous

{

lifetime time 12 hour ;

encryption_algorithm 3des, blowfish, des, rijndael ;

authentication_algorithm hmac_sha1, hmac_md5 ;

compression_algorithm deflate ;

}

IMPORTANT: The IPsec version (2.3.1) used in this example did not seem to support “aggressive” exchange_mode hence “main” is specified. However, it is possible to include more than mode by separating them with comma; i.e.

exchange_mode aggressive, main ;

Both ways (specifying one or more modes) works! Further other lines with more than one values separated by comma may contain only one value as described for exchange_mode above.

CONFIGURATION (Openswan IPsec, Router_B)

There are two (2) files on Router_B that needs editing: ipsec.conf (found in /etc on Linux) and ipsec.secrets (found in /etc on Linux).

Add the following line in ipsec.secrets: (This file defines the ends points of the tunnel to be established and also the pre-shared key to be used)

10.50.1.3 10.50.1.80: PSK “presharedkey”

NOTE: 1. Place the string after PSK in quotes if it does not start with 0x (as in a hexadecimal number), otherwise openswan will complain.

2. The string after PSK must be the same as that specified in psk.conf on Router_A.

Add the following lines in ipsec.conf: (This file defines among other things, the network to be protected, authentication methods, type of connection, etc.)

config setup

interfaces="ipsec0=eth1"

klipsdebug=none

plutodebug=none

uniqueids=yes

conn %default

keyingtries=0

authby=secret #rsasig

conn crypt

left=10.50.1.80

leftid=10.50.1.80

leftsubnet=10.1.13.1/24

right=10.50.1.3

rightid=10.50.1.3

rightsubnet=146.64.8.8/16

auto=start

type=tunnel

NOTE: The name of our connection is called “crypt”. Under “config setup”, the line interfaces=”ipsec0=eth1” must refer to a real interface (ifconfig will show available interfaces) and also must be the interface through which the data to be protected will travel, in case of more than one NIC. The line “auto=start” says, the connection “crypt” must be brought up when openswan ipsec starts up; to bring up the connection manually either comment out the line or specify “auto=ignore”. The explanation given for ipsec.conf on Router_A is pretty much the same as for Router_B.

STARTING UP IPsec and Racoon (FreeBSD).

At this point all machines are able to reach (ping) each other successfully. Next ensure ipsec and racoon are not running. On my machine I do:

verdi2istc#/etc/rc.d/ipsec stop

Clearing ipsec manual keys/policies.

to stop ipsec if it was already running; and do

verdi2istc# setkey -P -D

No SPD entries.

To ensure there are no IPsec SA/SP database entries; and next do

verdi2istc#killall racoon

to stop racoon.

Next issue

verdi2istc# /etc/rc.d/ipsec restart

to start ipsec, and to verify ipsec started successfully then do

verdi2istd# setkey -P -D

10.1.13.0/24[any] 146.64.0.0/16[any] any

in ipsec

esp/tunnel/10.50.1.80-10.50.1.3/require

created: Aug 30 09:27:39 2005 lastused: Aug 30 09:27:39 2005

lifetime: 0(s) validtime: 0(s)

spid=16531 seq=1 pid=583

refcnt=1

146.64.0.0/16[any] 10.1.13.0/24[any] any

out ipsec

esp/tunnel/10.50.1.3-10.50.1.80/require

created: Aug 30 09:27:39 2005 lastused: Aug 30 09:27:39 2005

lifetime: 0(s) validtime: 0(s)

spid=16530 seq=0 pid=583

refcnt=1

From Router_A, type either racoon (to run in the backgroung) or racoon –F

verdi2istd#racoon

or to fun in foreground type

verdi2istd#racoon -F -d

Foreground mode.

2005-08-30 09:51:59: INFO: main.c:172:main(): @(#)package version freebsd-20040818a

2005-08-30 09:51:59: INFO: main.c:174:main(): @(#)internal version 20001216 sakane@kame.net

2005-08-30 09:51:59: INFO: main.c:175:main(): @(#)This product linked OpenSSL 0.9.7d 17 Mar 2004 (http://www.openssl.org/)

2005-08-30 09:51:59: DEBUG: pfkey.c:434:pfkey_init(): call pfkey_send_register for AH

2005-08-30 09:51:59: DEBUG: pfkey.c:434:pfkey_init(): call pfkey_send_register for ESP

2005-08-30 09:51:59: DEBUG: pfkey.c:434:pfkey_init(): call pfkey_send_register for IPCOMP

2005-08-30 09:51:59: DEBUG: cftoken.l:578:yycf_set_buffer(): reading config file /usr/local/etc/racoon/racoon.conf

2005-08-30 09:51:59: DEBUG: pfkey.c:2379:pk_checkalg(): compression algorithm can not be checked because sadb message doesn't support it.

2005-08-30 09:51:59: DEBUG: grabmyaddr.c:206:grab_myaddrs(): my interface: 10.50.1.3 (ath0)

2005-08-30 09:51:59: DEBUG: grabmyaddr.c:206:grab_myaddrs(): my interface: fe80::202:6fff:fe21:2e71%ath0 (ath0)

2005-08-30 09:51:59: DEBUG: grabmyaddr.c:206:grab_myaddrs(): my interface: 146.64.8.1 (sis0)

2005-08-30 09:51:59: DEBUG: grabmyaddr.c:206:grab_myaddrs(): my interface: fe80::200:24ff:fec2:b684%sis0 (sis0)

2005-08-30 09:51:59: DEBUG: grabmyaddr.c:206:grab_myaddrs(): my interface: 127.0.0.1 (lo0)

2005-08-30 09:51:59: DEBUG: grabmyaddr.c:206:grab_myaddrs(): my interface: ::1 (lo0)

2005-08-30 09:51:59: DEBUG: grabmyaddr.c:206:grab_myaddrs(): my interface: fe80::1%lo0 (lo0)

2005-08-30 09:51:59: DEBUG: grabmyaddr.c:474:autoconf_myaddrsport(): configuring default isakmp port.

2005-08-30 09:52:00: DEBUG: grabmyaddr.c:496:autoconf_myaddrsport(): 7 addrs are configured successfully

2005-08-30 09:52:00: INFO: isakmp.c:1368:isakmp_open(): fe80::1%lo0[500] used as isakmp port (fd=5)

2005-08-30 09:52:00: INFO: isakmp.c:1368:isakmp_open(): ::1[500] used as isakmp port (fd=6)

2005-08-30 09:52:00: INFO: isakmp.c:1368:isakmp_open(): 127.0.0.1[500] used as isakmp port (fd=7)

2005-08-30 09:52:00: INFO: isakmp.c:1368:isakmp_open(): fe80::200:24ff:fec2:b684%sis0[500] used as isakmp port (fd=8)

2005-08-30 09:52:00: INFO: isakmp.c:1368:isakmp_open(): 146.64.8.1[500] used as isakmp port (fd=9)

2005-08-30 09:52:00: INFO: isakmp.c:1368:isakmp_open(): fe80::202:6fff:fe21:2e71%ath0[500] used as isakmp port (fd=10)

2005-08-30 09:52:00: INFO: isakmp.c:1368:isakmp_open(): 10.50.1.3[500] used as isakmp port (fd=11)

2005-08-30 09:52:00: DEBUG: pfkey.c:197:pfkey_handler(): get pfkey X_SPDDUMP message

2005-08-30 09:52:00: DEBUG: pfkey.c:197:pfkey_handler(): get pfkey X_SPDDUMP message

2005-08-30 09:52:00: DEBUG: policy.c:184:cmpspidxstrict(): sub:0xbfbfea30: 146.64.0.0/16[0] 10.1.13.0/24[0] proto=any dir=out

2005-08-30 09:52:00: DEBUG: policy.c:185:cmpspidxstrict(): db :0x809dc08: 10.1.13.0/24[0] 146.64.0.0/16[0] proto=any dir=in

The –d option is for debug, to see more output add extra –d.

IMPORTANT: At this point if all went well Client_A should not be reachable (try ping) from Router_B and Client_B; meaning private LAN_A is now protected. However, Router_A and Router_B should be able reach/see each other. Do not continue until this is accomplished.

STARTING UP OPENSWAN IPSEC

Now, on Router_B do:

root@Lawrence:/# ipsec setup restart

ipsec_setup: Stopping Openswan IPsec...

ipsec_setup: Starting Openswan IPsec 2.3.1...

verify that the IPsec tunnel has been established correctly by issuing:

root@Lawrence:/# ipsec whack --status

000 interface ipsec0/eth1 10.50.1.80

000 %myid = (none)

000 debug none

000

000 algorithm ESP encrypt: id=3, name=ESP_3DES, ivlen=64, keysizemin=168, keysizemax=168

000 algorithm ESP encrypt: id=12, name=ESP_AES, ivlen=128, keysizemin=128, keysizemax=256

000 algorithm ESP auth attr: id=1, name=AUTH_ALGORITHM_HMAC_MD5, keysizemin=128, keysizemax=128

000 algorithm ESP auth attr: id=2, name=AUTH_ALGORITHM_HMAC_SHA1, keysizemin=160, keysizemax=160

000

000 algorithm IKE encrypt: id=7, name=OAKLEY_AES_CBC, blocksize=16, keydeflen=128

000 algorithm IKE encrypt: id=5, name=OAKLEY_3DES_CBC, blocksize=8, keydeflen=192

000 algorithm IKE hash: id=2, name=OAKLEY_SHA1, hashsize=20

000 algorithm IKE hash: id=1, name=OAKLEY_MD5, hashsize=16

000 algorithm IKE dh group: id=2, name=OAKLEY_GROUP_MODP1024, bits=1024

000 algorithm IKE dh group: id=5, name=OAKLEY_GROUP_MODP1536, bits=1536

000 algorithm IKE dh group: id=14, name=OAKLEY_GROUP_MODP2048, bits=2048

000 algorithm IKE dh group: id=15, name=OAKLEY_GROUP_MODP3072, bits=3072

000 algorithm IKE dh group: id=16, name=OAKLEY_GROUP_MODP4096, bits=4096

000 algorithm IKE dh group: id=17, name=OAKLEY_GROUP_MODP6144, bits=6144

000 algorithm IKE dh group: id=18, name=OAKLEY_GROUP_MODP8192, bits=8192

000

000 stats db_ops.c: {curr_cnt, total_cnt, maxsz} :context={0,0,0} trans={0,0,0} attrs={0,0,0}

000

000 "crypt": 10.1.13.0/24===10.50.1.80...10.50.1.3===146.64.0.0/16; erouted; eroute owner: #2

000 "crypt": srcip=unset; dstip=unset

000 "crypt": ike_life: 3600s; ipsec_life: 28800s; rekey_margin: 540s; rekey_fuzz: 100%; keyingtries: 0

000 "crypt": policy: PSK+ENCRYPT+TUNNEL+PFS+UP; prio: 24,16; interface: eth1;

000 "crypt": newest ISAKMP SA: #1; newest IPsec SA: #2;

000 "crypt": IKE algorithm newest: 3DES_CBC_192-SHA1-MODP1024

000

000 #2: "crypt":500 STATE_QUICK_I2 (sent QI2, IPsec SA established); EVENT_SA_REPLACE in 27961s; newest IPSEC; eroute owner

000 #2: "crypt" esp.2ec9213@10.50.1.3 esp.aa7dc439@10.50.1.80 tun.1002@10.50.1.3 tun.1001@10.50.1.80

000 #1: "crypt":500 STATE_MAIN_I4 (ISAKMP SA established); EVENT_SA_REPLACE in 2625s; newest ISAKMP; nodpd

000

root@Lawrence:/#

At this point Client_A should be reachable by Client_B. On each/either Router do a tcpdump; and any packets with ESP indicates that the setup tunnel is currently handling data from the clients.

NOTE: ESP packets will only appear if there are packets from either client to the other client.

DEBUGGING (Openswan IPsec)

Earlier I showed how to stop a connection from being started up automatically by openswan. IPsec. So now with ipsec running but our connection “crypt” NOT up, we will debug the starting up of the connection (crypt). To debug the key exchange with racoon, first create a script with following content:

ipsec pluto --debug-all

ipsec whack \

--name crypt \

--tunnel \

--host 10.50.1.80 \

--nexthop 10.50.1.3 \

--client 10.1.13.1/24 \

--updown 'ipsec _updown' --id 10.50.1.80 \

--to \

--host 10.50.1.3 \

--client 146.64.8.1/16 \

--updown 'ipsec _updown' --id 10.50.1.3 \

--psk \

--esp 3des-md5,3des-sha1 \

--ike 3des-md5,3des-sha1 \

--encrypt

ipsec whack --listen

ipsec whack --route --name crypt

ipsec whack --initiate --name crypt

Running this script will show the various key exchange messages. The messages are pretty much clear to see what it’s happening.

=HowTo stop DHCP client over-writing resolv.conf=

Finally I found out how to do it

Edit the /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf file
Find the line that says request

Comment out the line that requests for domain-name, domain-name-servers and host-name

request subnet-mask, broadcast-address, time-offset, routers,
# domain-name, domain-name-servers, host-name,
netbios-name-servers, netbios-scope;

=HowTo setup DHCP with OLSR=

There have been so many misleading postings on this - I will finally set the record straight.

You will need to reserve a block of IP's for non OLSR wireless clients that want to connect onto the mesh network such as a laptop. Here is an example setup:

Wireless router 1:
Wireless IP: 10.51.1.13
LAN IP: 10.3.13.1
Subnet for Wireless DHCP clients: 10.51.1.64/28 (This would mean that 16 machines could potentially connect to this wireless router. The IP leases will be in the range from 10.51.1.64 to 10.51.1.79)

Wireless router 2:
Wireless IP: 10.51.1.14
LAN IP: 10.3.14.1
Subnet for Wireless DHCP clients : 10.51.1.80/28 (IP leases will be in the range from 10.51.1.80 to 10.51.1.93)

To set this up On Friefunk firmware
Wireless Router 1:
OLSR:
OLSR DHCP: 10.51.1.64/28

Wireless Router 2:
OLSR:
OLSR DHCP: 10.51.1.80/28

Most people gave strange values for OLSR DHCP in their postings the most common one was:
OLSR DHCP: 10.51.1.80/28, 255.255.255.240

The subnet mask after the comma (255.255.255.240) is an alternative to the slash format /28. Why does everyone have this reduntant subnet mask on their postings???

=Linux HowTos=
==HowTo setup your own network profiles on a laptop==

I have always wanted to write some good scripts that configure my laptop for home and work wireless/ethernet automatically in ubuntu and so I set about building up a set of scripts that I can call.

I have four scenarios:
1. use laptop at home with wireless access point
2. use laptop at home with ethernet
3. use laptop at work with wireless access point
4. use laptop at work with ethernet

I created two files in /etc/network: interfaces.work and interfaces.home with all the ethernet and wireless settings for home and work in this file

/etc/network/interfaces.home
# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
iface eth0 inet static
address 10.3.13.102
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 10.3.13.1

#The wireless network interface
iface eth1 inet dhcp
wireless-essid pta-mesh
wireless-mode Ad-Hoc
wireless-channel 1
wireless-key off

/etc/network/interfaces.work
# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
iface eth0 inet dhcp

# The wireless network interface
iface eth1 inet dhcp
wireless-essid icomtek
wireless_mode Managed
wireless-key off

I also created two files with my dns and domain settings for home and work in /etc/ called resolv.home and resolv.work

resolv.home
search icomtek.csir.co.za elarduspark.org.za cids.org.za
nameserver 146.64.28.1 10.3.13.1

resolv.work
search icomtek.csir.co.za cids.org.za
nameserver 146.64.28.1

Here are my scripts that configure my interfaces based on the above files

1. Setup for wireless networking at home
/usr/local/bin/homenet-wireless

#!/bin/bash
echo Setting up network for home wireless network
sudo cp /etc/network/interfaces.home /etc/network/interfaces

eth0_status=`ifconfig | grep eth0`
eth1_status=`ifconfig | grep eth1`

if [ -n "$eth0_status" ]; then
sudo ifdown eth0
fi

if [ -n "$eth1_status" ]; then
sudo ifdown eth1
fi

sudo ifup eth1

sudo cp /etc/resolv.home /etc/resolv.conf

2. Setup for ethernet networking at home
/usr/local/bin/homenet-fixed
#!/bin/bash
echo Setting up network for home ethernet
sudo cp /etc/network/interfaces.home /etc/network/interfaces
sudo cp /etc/resolv.home /etc/resolv.conf

eth0_status=`ifconfig | grep eth0`
eth1_status=`ifconfig | grep eth1`

if [ -n "$eth0_status" ]; then
sudo ifdown eth0
fi

if [ -n "$eth1_status" ]; then
sudo ifdown eth1
fi

sudo ifup eth0

3. Setup for wireless at work
/usr/local/bin/worknet-wireless
#!/bin/bash
echo Setting up network for work wireless network
sudo cp /etc/network/interfaces.work /etc/network/interfaces
sudo cp /etc/resolv.work /etc/resolv.conf

eth0_status=`ifconfig | grep eth0`
eth1_status=`ifconfig | grep eth1`

if [ -n "$eth0_status" ]; then
sudo ifdown eth0
fi

if [ -n "$eth1_status" ]; then
sudo ifdown eth1
fi

sudo ifup eth1

4. Setup for ethernet at work
/usr/local/bin/worknet-fixed
#!/bin/bash
echo Setting up network for work ethernet
sudo cp /etc/network/interfaces.work /etc/network/interfaces
sudo cp /etc/resolv.work /etc/resolv.conf

eth0_status=`ifconfig | grep eth0`
eth1_status=`ifconfig | grep eth1`

if [ -n "$eth0_status" ]; then
sudo ifdown eth0
fi

if [ -n "$eth1_status" ]; then
sudo ifdown eth1
fi

sudo ifup eth0

==HowTo Setup a Linux machine to become an access point==

1. Make sure you install dhcpd off the Mandrake disks

2. Put the Wireless card into access point mode with the following example script /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wifi0

DEVICE=wifi0
BOOTPROTO=static
IPADDR=192.168.0.1
ONBOOT=yes
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
NETWORK=192.168.0.0
BROADCAST=192.168.0.255
DHCP_TIMEOUT=5
WIRELESS_MODE=Master
WIRELESS_ESSID=mesh
WIRELESS_CHANNEL=10

3. run ifup wifi0

4. copy /etc/dhcpd.conf.sample (this file only exisits the first time you install dhcpd) to dhcpd.conf ... Change the IP address allocations in this file to suite your needs

5. start dhcpd with /etc/rc.d/init.d/dhcpd

6. Check the /var/lib/dhcpd/dhcpd.leases to check which IP addresses are being assigned

==HowTo Set up the SENOA card in linux==

1. Download the hostap driver from ftp://edna.icomtek.csir.co.za/pub/drivers ... This driver ensures that the SENOA card can run in Access point mode as well as Ad-Hoc and Infrastructure

2. Unzip using gunzip < hostap-driver-0.2.4.tar.gz | tar xvf -

3. Change Makefile to include KERNEL_PATH ... KERNEL_PATH=/usr/src/linux

4. Run 'make'

5. run 'make install'

6. Restart card manager using /etc/rc.d/init.d/pcmcia restart

If you are using the PCI to PCMCIA bridge card with the RLSC475 chipset follow these steps

1. Edit the file /etc/sysconfig/pcmcia to include these lines
PCMCIA=yes
PCIC=RLSC475

2. Run /etc/rc.d/init.d/pcmcia restart

==Linux network configurations tips==

1. Setting IP address and modes of interface

The file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 contains all the settingsfor interface eth0 including
IP allocation type (static or dynamic)
IP Address
Subnet mask
Broadcast address
Wireless mode
wireless channel

type
# man ifcfg
to see all the options for this config file

Use
# ifup eth0
to bring eth0 network interface up using the script ifcfg-eth0

#ifdown eth0
to pull the eth0 interface down

2. The DNS nameserver

The file /etc/resolve.conf contains the nameserver (dns) to use for the network

3. The gateway and other network routes

To see the current network routes type
# route
This will show you all the routes which the network is currently using

To add a new route for interface eth0 type
# route add -net 10.0.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 dev eth0

This adds a route to the network 10.0.0.0 using device eth0

# route add default gw 10.0.0.8
Adds a default route which will be used if no other route matches.

There should be an existing route, in this case, to 10.0.0.8 through some interface.

=HowTo use the freespace loss equation=
From: [http://www.swisswireless.org/wlan_calc_en.html Radio theory and link planning for Wireless LAN (WLAN)]

Everyone should know the free space loss equation in their head

Loss [ dB] = 32.44 + 20(Log(distance[km]) + Log(freq[MHz]))

Useful cable losses

RG58 = 1 dB/m
RG213 = -.6 dB/m
RG174 = 2 dB/m (often used in pigtails)
LMR-400 = 0.22 dB/m

Typical WiFi sensitivity for orinoco cards

11Mbps = -82dBm
5.5Mbps = -87dBm
2Mbps = -92dBm
1Mbps = -94dBm

Typical allowed signal to noise ratios for orinoco cards

11Mbps = 16dB
5.5Mbps = 11dB
2Mbps = 7dB
1Mbps = 4dB

Typical Noise level at 2.4GHz = -100dBm. Compute S/N level eg. at 11Mbps = -84dBm but sensitivity is -82dBm so sensitivity is the limiting factor.

Just worked out that with our 2 8dBi omnis, 2dB loss in the RF cable each side of the link and the 200mW SENOA cards it is possible to acheive a theoretical distance of 5km with a 3dB margin (margin probably a bit tight), 4km will give you a 5dB margin - probably more realistic.

Mpumulanga Mesh

2005-12-25T20:37:42Z

Kilos:

== Location ==

White River is a medium sized town about 20 minutes north of Nelspruit, the capital of Mpumalanga Province. Peables Valley and the Masoi Tribal land is located 20 minutes to the North East of White River along the road leading to the Kruger National Parks Numbi gate.

The area is hilly with some large granite outcrops. The Peables Valley stretches from the ACTS clinic and divides the commercial farms from the Masoi area. Commercial farming in the broader area is predominately timber but fortunately along the valley there is no timber farming (this would pose a connectivity problem and impact line of sight requirements). The farmers as a community are already well connected (organisationally not in terms of Internet connectivity) with commando like structures in place because of crime.

The ACTS clinic is located at the beginning of the Valley. ACTS stands for AIDS Care Training and Support Clinic. They provide medical services to AIDS patients, councilling, testing and Anti-retroviral (ARV) treatment. The clinic has gained a reputation within the community with many people coming from outside of the Masoyi area for treatment. They are have been selected for managing ARV roleout because of their well developed councilling, testing and support group networks. Currently they have about 200 people on ARVs with this figure likely to grow to over 600. These treatements are being monitored by researchers at WITS University.

The Masoyi area runs along the right hand side of the valley. We identified approximately 10 schools, with two identified as being high schools with computer facilities. The project team has good links to a teacher in one of these schools who is in charge of the computer lab. In the area there is also a teachers training centre, government hospital and various government clinics in the area. The ACTS clinic runs a hospice close to one of the Government clinics.

== Situation in the Community ==

The community is underserviced. Most roads remain unpaved with the main road having been rebuilt after the floods of 2000. Electricity is available within the community.
The community is poor and has been hugely impacted by AIDS. Losing salaried member of households through AIDS has a bi impact on extended families. There is also the associated superstition and secretiveness around AIDS which does not help improve the situation.

== ACTS clinic ==

The clinic is a non-profit organisation established to provide AIDS care in the Masoyi area. It was initially sponsored by Glaxo Smithcline. The clinic has two doctors, an onsite hospice, training centre and accomodation for people on training courses.

A number of staff have been trained to provide pre-test and post-test councilling. This leaves the doctors free to focus on the medical aspects of treatment. The clinic operates in many ways like a private doctors practice. They charge consultation fees and patients on medical aid are charged accordingly. They however usually waive all fees as soon as it is established that a patient is suffering from AIDS. The clinic is relatively sopphisticated in their use of computers: they run practice management software, are connected to the Internet via Vsat for their research with WITS. They also have some custom MS Access based applications written internally to track patient statistics.

== Proposed Solution ==

Deploy a mesh network within the Peables Valley, run training courses to transfer skills on mesh setup and installation, work together with the clinic staff using Free Attitude Interviews (FAI) to discover applications and uses that work for the staff.

== What problem is being addressed ==

The main thrust is to connect the clinic to its community hospice and thus allow them to extend their computer facilities to the hospice (practise management software and statistics gathering). This is most easily achieved through a wireless network and more specifically a mesh because of the terrain.

A mesh network requires a number of nodes in areas not owned by the clinic but that are part of the commuity: schools and farmers. The main thrust of the research question is to implement the network in such a way that the firstly the clinic and secondly the community have taken ownership of the network. That they have created systems that ensure that the infrastructure is maintained and expanded by the users of the network.

== Technology Explained ==

A wireless network involves radios and arials. The radios broadcast and receive signals which are boosted and directed by the arials. Anyone with a radio can access the network. The spectrum used for Wifi required line-of-sight for connectivity. The routes between sites are also hard coded or manually adjusted in each device. This makes it technically difficult on two levels. Firstly, you need a deaper understanding or the radio spectrum and the operation of radio wave and secondly, configuration of the equipment requires a higher level of skill.

A mesh network uses the same infrastructure: aerials and radios. But at the network level it operated differently. The network simply requires that each node can see at least one other node (ie it can be part of the network) and that each node can send trafic to any node on the network (ie there are no islands which are not connected to the whole). In a mesh network this problem is solved at the software level. As long as your node can see another node it will be able to determine the routes to follow. The also allows for a level of self healing and thus less maintenance. If for example a truck parks in from of the node or a tree grows up over time and block the signal to another node then as long as the node can see an alternate node it can route traffic via this new path. On a conventional wireless network this would need to be manually configured.

The choice of mesh in the Peables Valley was made for these reasons:
Hilly terrain that requires a number of hops to reach the destination
Low skilled network operators
Changing conditions in the environment. Nodes that disappear through neglect, theft, obstruction.

== Social Challenges ==

There are a number of social challenges:

Firstly, for the the network to operate to serivice firstly the clinic and secondly the community it requires the cooperations of teachers in schools and of farmers. They all have there own agenda's there own perceptions of their expected level of involvment and their expectation of how aid is given to them.

In the school we are concerned about a hand-out mentality that will not see the school working hard to be involved in the extension of the mesh but simply being involved as long as it takes to link the school to the Internet. There is also the risk of our contact at the school wanting to be seen as being in charge and not wanting to work together with schools in the community.

To addess that we are looking at bringing the school pupils into the process from the beginning and teaching them how to install and configure equipment.

Secondly, with the farmers we are confident that it will be easy to sell them the concept of Internet connectivity. However, for the network to work for them will require that they connect to schools in the Masoyi area. We are not certain about the realtionship between these two groups. Considering the crime levels there is the risk that there is not a good level of trust.

Our strategy is to involve people from both groups during training workshops. Which at the very least would allow realtionships to be established.

Lastly, this is not the primary focus of the ACTS clinic so there will always be the risk that people are redeployed.

However, our main contact in the clinic is an electrical engineer by profession and the clinic itself has proved that they are a teaching organisation (their previous garder now runs the reception).

== Technical Challenges ==

Mesh networks are a new phenomena with the software sometimes not yet at the level required for the mesh to operate well. There is the risk that in this project we will discover the limitations of the technology and have to spend time compensating for that.

Some of the endpoint nodes we have identified require many hops. This requires many nodes. This is both a social and technical challenge. Social in that the project needs to bring each of those players on board and technical in that each of those nodes needs to be built, deployed and maintained.

There is also the risk of theft. The node equipment has very little commercial resale value in the community, although there seems to be wifi operating in the Nelspruit, White River area. However, that never seems to be a consideration of petty thieves. Hopefully deploying the equipment in established locations: schools, shops, private homes and not simply in the open will help secure the equipment.

== Equipment Ownership ==

As the objective is to create a community based network where the network is seen as a community asset so therefore some of the equipment at key nodes should belong to the community. Official ownership will be with the ACTS clinic until such time as a more formal structure for ownership of key mesh equipment can be established.

As the mesh grows individual node owners will own their own equipment. So a farmer or school will be the owner of that equipment and it will form part of the mesh. It is hoped that farmers will partner with institutions such as schools in which case the partners will define ownership relationships.

The project does not envision supplying any equipment to farmers unless they are located such that having equipment on their farm is critical to creating the mesh. In such as case we would look at funding that node if the project has to but the project will still attempt to have the farmer install his/her own equipment.

== Intellectual Property ==

The project will release all work under a suitable Open Source license. This work includes documentation and results of the research.

The project will not be developing any independent software but will be using other freely available mesh software. In the case that software is improved or modified it will be released under the license of the original software project to ensure that it can be included in future releases of that software.

== Sustainability ==

A key component to sustainability will be involvement of the farmers, Bible colleges, etc within the Peables Valley. The project will draw in the farmers for the following reasons: 1) they are a source of skills, 2) they have finances to pay for Internet connectivity and 3) that once they become users they are likely to become dependent on the mesh and thus ensure its ongoing success.

Part of the program will be to educate participants from the start so that they can extend the reach of the mesh. Included will be education of pupils from the partner schools. This education is designed to ensure that enough skills are available in the valley to repair nodes, setup new nodes, manage the mesh and train others.

A key component to the sustainability is that the project manager as the ACTS clinic is a qualified electrical engineer. We are therefore confident that it will not be difficult to educate him on the workings of the mesh network. He has already demonstrated his excitement and commitment to the project by spending a Saturday with the project leaders evaluating high sites. He is involved in training staff and is extremely practical so will be invaluable in erecting high sites.

== Pros and Cons of the system ==

First considering some positive aspects of the mesh. Firstly the clinic is already using IT infrastructure in the following areas: ARV monitoring, clinic management and accounts. Farmer, bible colleges, etc in the community already use the Internet for email etc but usually at great cost because of the limited choice of commectivity options. The partner schools already has a lab that has in the past been connected to the Internet. So there is already a body of people who have demonstrated the willingness or need to use the Internet who we feel would be willing the use a mesh if it provide always on and lower Internet connectivity costs.

The potential problems we see are the following. There is the risk that the effort to manage or be part of the mesh may be more expensive then direct connection especially in the case of the lack of good neighbourliness from any mesh participant. The clinic, although they currently use IT extensively, may in fact not need to extend that usage beyond the main clinic. The risk with the schools we feel is that there is a general hand-out mentality and that there will not be the will to learn, extend the network or integrate this into the curriculum. Another large risk is the sustainability of the network not from the mesh side but from the side of financing the hop onto the Internet itself.

== Backhaul Connectivity ==

The connectivity to ACTS is provided via Telkom VSAT. ACTS uses the connection as part of their involvement in ARV roleout for the Right To Care group. They have an Internet based application for capturing details of patients for monitoring and evaluating patients receiving ARVs

== Network Topology ==

[[Image:Acts meshnet.jpg]]

== News Flashes ==

== September 22, 2005, WiFi in the bush or the plot ==

Duane visited the IDRC funded workshop for WiFi in Africa. Sorry don't knwo what the real project name is. Sat in on the session on regulation, the Department of Communications delegates decided that this would be a good time to leave. Nice when you know you can't actually stand the heat.

Had a look at their cantenna based access-point liming over about 5km. With a Linksys strapped to a tree with... red tape... man we can't get away from red tape in this industry.

Most surprising was plot.net a local WISP that delivers Internet to about 100 customers and nobody new that they existed before booking the venue. They do long haul links to ADSL connections in Pretoria. Quite an innoative solution to high cost access. I want to explore that possibility in Peebles Valley.

== October 06, 2005 Wikipedia on the mesh ==

David and I visited the Peebles Mesh this week for two days and here is
a quick synopsis of events:

- We installed a firewall. This has software which should allow us to
control and cap bandwidth and it separates us from the clinic.
- We installed a local copy of Wikipedia. Still some bugs but very fast
- We can now access the site remotely

Big SURPRISE

Our cantennae was still operating! We did a data transfer from the
wireless box to ourselves. 3 hops I think at 192kB/s

First farmer online

We connected the chairman of the local farmers group to the Internet.
It was lovely we just watched and took notes. The farmers younger
brother had returned from the UK with a new laptop. We got that
connected. The first thing he asked is if he could download music - ho
hum :)

The sister of the farmer was also visiting and started giving her mother
a sales pitch about how they could talk to each other using skype for
free.

Was lovely to watch and we had boere kos but arrived a bit late for
lunch. We will ensure that doesn't happen again.

== July 06, 2005, Realisation of a mesh vision ==

Today we had a film crew filming the installation of a mesh node. It was great fun but they did waste our time a bit. Technically this is what we got done:

* Installed the node on Agnus' house permanately. Lassy did all this work
* Put a 3m pole at the Hospice to see if we can get over the ridge
* Upgraded AGNUS, HOSPICE and SIKILE to OpenWrt
* The clinic is cabling various buildings so we will be able to recover one node an just run a cable from the FLATS node to the VSAT.

We had a 7ms delay between AGNUS and ACTS_VSAT which is a route that passes through all present nodes. VoIP is now truely achievable. Wonderful performance compared to WDS mode. Throw out WDS wherever you see it its just not worth the effort. It is honestly more simple to setup OLSR. Glad we've learnt that and can move on.

We still ahve the following technical hurdles to overcome. The default route keeps disappearing. We need to install a proper firewall. Once that is done we can move onto the community adoption.

The day was full of some lovely experiences of the potential of what we are doing.

Once we had AGNUS up we setup Dave's laptop and had Agnus' daughter and a neighbour sit at the computer. Dave opened Google. They didn't know what to do. We asked them waht infomration they wanted to know. Stuck again. "Who is your favourite singer?" - Alicia Keys - "OK type that in the seach box, then click on search" - Shouts of glee as the search results return. "Now click here". Off they went to Alecia Keys home site and disappeared for about 10 minutes. Does that count as training? The two of them were sitting inside quite a dark house, they sat together on a sofa and the laptop screen glowed in the semi-dark with their face highlighted. This exact image was the vision I had for this project. So that made my day.

I did a quick training course in the dirt. Explaining what the differnt aerials did, how it all fitted together. And of course how to use a high-gain antenna as a fish braai. Lassy provided Swati translation as soon as there was any confusion.

Now off to the school to film students working on computers. They wanted to interview the teacher, who was a standin for Mr Sihlabela who we usualy work with. "What will you use the Internet for at your school", to which he replied, "I don't know". David did a quick exercise of taking the teacher, a history teacher, to Google. They Googled for "Shaka Zulu" and ended up at a very good site on the subject. "What will you use the Internet for at your school", and we got a 5 minute reply. Does that count as training?

What worked best about this trip was having a very focussed objective - get the mesh working. We didn't care about the firewall, the billing, shapping, etc. And we got it done. The next trips will be similarly techically focussed.

== July 05,2005 Moving on to OLSR ==

I left Peebles Valley at the end of May and this is the first return since then. David and I are migrating all the Linksys boxes from Sveasfot to OpenWrt, specifically the builds produced by Freifunk which has a nice web interface. Lassy has joined us again and is helping us move the equipment around.

The task involves loading the Freifunk firmware onto the box. This requires local connectivity. We still had connection problem until we discovered the ghosts of a WDS past. Alot of WDS settings were still on each of the boxes. We've now had to go and remove those especially the Lazy WDS mode settings which keep establishing bridges. OLSR looks like the right solution. Its the same amount of work as WDS setup but you get real routes, ones that you see and can traceroute through so you can actually see exactly how packets are being routed on the network. I'm much much happier. Yesterday we got USAID, ACTS_VSAT and ACTS_FLATS converted. Today we are in the field with a film crew and will migrate: AGNUS house, SIKILE_HIGH and FARM_COBUS. If we can get traffic from either Agnus' house or Cobus' farm then we know that the protocol is good, both these points would have to route through. SIKILE, USAID, ACTS_FLATS then ACTS_VSAT. WDS could never do that and if we can get this working then the mesh is good and we can move onto the next challenging problem.

At the last conservanc meeting at which ACTS slinic was present they mentioned the Mesh but all the famers were wondering when exactly anythin would happen. Hopefully we have a working system before we leave.

We also spoke to Frans Benz whose property is below USAID and he is still interested.

Of the nodes that we have observed all were powered up except ACTS_VSAT this was good as it means that people are leaving the equipment to do its job. THe VSAT was down because the plug is just too close to a usefull double adapter.

We have brought 300m of CAT5 cable which the clinic will use to run cable from the VSat to the Flat so we can eliminate one node and use it elsewhere. This clinic has arranged conduit and pulling of the cables.

== February 19, 2005, Lessons learned from week long meshing ==

Lessons learnt

* Test test test: test devices in a known controlled environment. The box couldn't connect and we weren't sure exactly why.
* Use your own stuff: don't use other peoples stuff. We tried to use the alarm companies mast, it was rubbish and about to fall down. But it could also endanger our equipment when the alarm company removes there antennae.
* Equipment: cover for your laptop so you can see the screen. Backpack/fishing jacket also a head- mounted display wouldn't hurt (to monitor the wireless network). Rifle-mounted antennae with sight. Tri-pod for temporary mounting of equipment. Ladders are a problem you need a long extension ladder about 6m.
* Windows Sucks: we had major packet drop yet on Linux the network pings work perfectly. Either Windows has a simple and incompetant network layer or it puts so much rubbish on the network that it sucks up all bandwidth. Why do people use this rubbish!
* Testing protocol: It would be usefull to have a set standard of how you tackle problem. Many time you go down the wrong route. Simple idea: mount antennae with laptop and get signal strengths right. Then connect box browse to the box over the wire and check for links. Lastly connect to the box as a wireless client.

Observations on the first stage

The object of this exercise was for David and I to learn how to setup the equipment before involving the community. This objective has been met: the mesh functions well, we can monitor it and we can use it from any node.
Successes

We created a 4 node mesh that works and can connect to the Internet. Although we had issues these were just teething problem for the technicians and the hardware is really box-drop ready. This is really positive for a non-technical mesh community.

We met with the farmers and they now know what we are doing which give us easier access to their properties. The USAid couple were very helpful, very keen and are well known and liked in the community. We hope that this relationship and them being early users will help increase adoption within the farming community.

We validated that we can connect to the school through the USAid node. Although our contact at the school was on sick leave the principle made arrangements for another teacher to stay after school on Friday for almost 4 hours while we attempted to setup their node. We also noted the school now has a 15 seat computer lab.

The ACTS clinic staff were quite excited especially those that are volunteers from overseas. A number of ideas for the use of the network were put forward by the staff. These included using house bound AIDS patients to data capture for the clinic or simply to create new virtual relationships. Also suggested was using instant messaging as a form of anonymous counciling to allow school pupils to speak openly about AIDS.
Issues noted

Support! We have already got our first support call from people who use operating system that know better then you what they want to do. This is a source of potential problems as people will phone the clinic and overbuden an already busy staff. We need to investigate how the community can provide that support or busget to pay for such support.

Lightning! This is going to be a serious problem, there are solutions such as mast spikes that we need to install.

Power downs. The clinic powers off most of their equipment at night thus taking the gateway down. We need to look at way to keep this up. The conection also require human intervention and we need to investigate automation of this taks.

Network separation. The mesh is currently on the clinic network. The clinic does deal with sensitive data but also for security and management issues we need to seperate the neworks from each other.

Usage monitoring, charging. We need to begin monitoring and controlling usage so that we can explore charging models in the future.

Windows... it puts junk on the network. We need to look at simple firewall rules on the nodes to drop NetBEUI junk from the network.
Next steps

We will return to the site in a months time. At this time we wish to: separate the networks, install the school node, install a monitoring and access control system and announce a training course for the following month.

We will separate the networks by installing a new network card on the firewall. Most probably we will use NoCatAuth to control access to the network but need to investigate alternatives.

Other things to investigate are models for charging for network usage. Currently our strategy is to have farmers cross-subsidise the schools connectivity. A problem with this however is that other forms of connectivity are becoming relatively cheap (3G, etc) so this still needs to be reasonable.

== February 19, 2005, Too much sun for a geek ==

Day 4: Had steak at the conservancy meeting. Talked a little about the mesh - nobody understood what I was tgalking about... But getting cheap Internet sounded cool to them. The farmers have serious problem with Telk^h^h^h^h connectivity, phones, lightning, macadamia thieves, water, etc.

Day 5: Dave J works for a big parastatal like company which means he always comes late cause someone wants him to do something (he tells me he was fighting Jhb traffic to get more Linksys boxes. Mainly spent the morning getting ntop (a great network monitoring tool working) and got EtherApe (nice graphical monitoring tool) working. These are quite good for seeing how badly Windows abuses network resources.

Spent the afternoon with David at Sikhile High. Was pretty fruitless we couldn't work out if it was the box, antennae, or sun that was messing us around.

Day 6: Installed the USAid node properly. Took a long time and got really sunburned. Note to self need a ladder, suntan lotion, umbrella and LOTS of water. Installed a 90deg patch panel. We had major problems getting links to the clinic which was frustrating.

== February 17, 2005, More meshing ==

Day 3 cont...: Got USAid online, had been switched off not blown up by lightning. Phew. Installed a second mesh point which proved not to be needed. Worked out how to add parameters to the Kismet display, only worked out later that the signal strength bar graph is completely arbitrary. Will need to check all that again today. Installed an AP on the accomodation block, this seems a waste and we will probnably run cable from an AP installed on the staff flats instead.

Day 4: David J should be joining me today and we will be meeting with the farmers in the conservancy for a braai. I hope that we can raise the issue of what we are building and get people excited. Just before leaving yesterday I got everything up: I can ping all the other APs and can get out onto the net. I'll be checking this again remotely to see if I can get from USAid, to the clinic and out.

== February 16, 2005, Meshing ==

I've had a busy few days here in Peables Valley:

Day 1: Setup a linksys on the roof of the clinic. Found that we really can't see Petra from here or anywhere actually, Petra is a nice high point but all buildings are hidden behind a large rock. We installed one at a house belonging to consultants for USAid. This is a good site as we can see the staff flats from there but none of the other buildings. The problem with this is we now need to find a good spot at the clinic so that we can see USAid without using two APs at the clinic.

I visited the school, unfortunately Mr Sihlabela is off ill until March. I met with the principle and two other teachers and have agreed to visit on Friday with David. The school can see USAid but we still need to confirm the signal strength.

In discussions with various people I realised that lightning is going to be a serious problem. With all the equipment on an AP costing about R2,000 it can cripple a network if they have a serious strike.

Day 2: A frustrating day trying to get Kismet working. This involved creating a patched kernel to allow the orinoco driver to go into Monitor mode. Finding, downloading and compiling takes a long time. I did manage to get onto the clinic roof and confirm that we couldn't see a signal from USAid. We did get a signal from the staff flats.

In discussing uses for the network we had some new ideas:

* Getting house ridden patients a computer to get them communicating and getting outside virtually.
* Having the same patient do data capturing to bolster his income
* We also talked about using SMS and cellphones for compliance. Setting alarms for medicine taking. SMS messages that require a reply to check compliance. Notifying support group buddies about people not replying to SMS notification so that they can check that they're OK.

Day 3: Kismet is working! Not all the information is that useful for what I need to do. Met the clinic staff today to try and explain what we're doing. Today I'm checking signal strength from the school, its seems however that USAid is offline.

== February 11, 2005, Equipment got ==

We now have the equipment for the FMFI Wireless project in Mpumalanga. We have 10 Linksys wireless AP which we're firmware upgrading. The cards are in a nice heavy duty all weather box. A picture would be great :). All the boxes are being moded to do power over ethernet which makes hte whole installation clean and simple. Currently it looks like costs are around R2,000 a node.

I'm lugging the lot down to White River this weekend and will erect 3 of the nodes. Mainly to test equipment and get a working initial network. The other nodes will be setup by the community, following the Onno Purbo style of network deployment.