Mpumulanga Mesh

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

13 August, 2006 The power of remote control

USAID had been down for about a week, my fears were that USAID may have been damaged. So I contacted logged into the firewall at ACTS and started a ping session to USIAD. I then phoned Jan at USIAD and asked her to check the power on the node. She wiggled the plug a bit and Viola! the ping came up and I could confirm that the node was indeed alive again - hooray for remote management!

7 August, 2006 Wikipedia PC down

Looks like the power supply is bust, Dumisani checked the PC and couldn't power it up - OK we need to place on our next trip. Again this was due to remote management - noticed the PC wasn't responsive

5 August, 2006 Things going wrong in the mesh

Agnes computer is not connecting to the mesh - Dumisani discovered that the driver for the ethernet interface is not working. Hopefully we can move Dumisani to an advanced level of Linux support so that he can fix driver problems soon. I suggest an advanced Linux course of jim - I sure he will drink it up and enjoy the challenge.

1 August, 2006 We have a local expert at ACTS

I got a phone call from Dumisani at the ACTS clinic, he was sent to fix Agnes' computer. I took him re-installing Ubuntu, I was expecting the usual "Do you see the picture of the world - click on the picture - left, button etc." instead he just said, so what must the IP address be and what username and password should I give Agnes, that's it and he did the rest. Wow! this is truly good news for sustainability of the mesh

July 22, 2006 I can support this network now from my own lounge

I arrive at the clinic at 8:30AM and my good night sleep helps me realise that the link between the firewall and the server should be a cross over cable (this is a PC-to-PC link) luckily, I have one of these in my armoury of equipment. Then I realise that the internet port on the Linksys wireless router was set to 10.3.1.2 and not 10.2.1.2. I change the script on the firewall and reconfigure the interface to 10.3.1.1 – now the link to the wireless router is working. So all the networking stuff is working fine. I login to the wikipedia server and I can reach the outside world via the clinic VSAT. I phone John and ask him to check if the reverse port forwarding is working from Pretoria – he checks and all is well.

This is a big step forward – now we can remotely: Upgrade firmware, Check usage of the network, Change firewall rules, Remotely login to other computers in the mesh and the list goes on.

I neaten up all the cables glue by glueing them onto the wall and skirting, do one last test with my laptop. I open up wikipedia and mediwiki wirelessly from my laptop and login to the firewall and ssh to Pretoria and back again to the clinic – Yipppee! success.

I noticed that the school node is down and on Monday I phone Mr Sehlabela who tells me that all the computers, the server and the multi plug that the wireless router is plugged into are turned off after school every day. ARRGGGHH! I realise that there is still a lot of learning needed on how a wireless mesh network depends on other nodes having reliable power sources (people controlled and power utility controlled) to be viable. I ask him to make sure that the wireless router stays on in the future as it will help us to support his computers remotely and keep the rest of the mesh alive.

Hopefully, in the future, it will be the farmers who depend on the school link making the phone call, asking the teacher to keep the node up. Then we will truly see the symbiotic vision of mesh networking becoming a reality.

July 21, 2006 Firewall and Wikipedia installed

Finally David gets an Avis car with a large boot (Nissan Almera). Leave Pretoria with my wife and kids, Nula, Samuel and Luke. Arrive in White river at about 3:00PM. Nula drops me at clinic and heads back to B&B.

I manage to catch Harry before he heads home and chat about the current state of the ACTS network. Harry explains the layout of the fibre network linking the main ACTS building with the dispensary and the flats. He explains that it is working very well and that the speed of the network makes you almost think a remote PC is like a local hard drive. With the wireless node being on top of the flats and no dedicated fibre for the connecting the wireless node on the flats with the clinic firewall, I realise that the best place to put my firewall and server is in Avery's flat.

I explain the firewall rules that have been set up to save the precious 2Gig cap on the VSAT and Harry agrees that 250Meg for the farmers and 250 Meg for the school should be OK. He is also happy with the dynamic bandwidth allocation rules which look as follows:

The Peebles Valley mesh network in Mpumalanga consists of the following players

ACTS clinic infrastructure
Clinic Staff
Commercial farmers
Schools
General community members

Currently the VSAT link at the clinic is the only internet access in the Mpumalanga wireless network.

A firewall will be setup with three interfaces
First interface: 192.168.0.4 to VSAT gateway
Second interface 10.4.1.1 to local servers eg. wikipedia and mail
Third interface 10.2.1.1 to wireless network 

The VSAT is a Telkom subscription with a 2 Gig cap 256K down 64K up link.

The requirement for the firewall is the following

Byte counting rules

Schools should receive a total of 250Meg per month
Commercial farmers should receive a total of 250Meg per month
General community members will have no internet access - only have access to local wikipedia
Clinic staff and clinic infrastructure will be uncapped

Traffic shaping rules

Clinic infrastructure and clinic staff should receive a guaranteed 128K download speed when there is other traffic on the VSAT.
Clinic infrastructure and clinic staff should have access to the full 128K when there is no other  traffic
Schools and farmers will be able to use what ever bandwidth is left once after the clinic and clinic staff have received there guaranteed share.
If both schools and farmers are accessing the internet – they should be distributed at a ratio of 2:1 Farmers:School

Access control 

For now access control will be based on IP addresses (see diagram for current IP allocations – a better grouping of IP allocations for different users types might be useful in the future)

I take all my loot up to Avery's flat with the help of some volunteer workers. As I start setting up all the gear in her study, I realise that the Ethernet cable to the wireless box has been cut by the fibre installation guys. They probably thought that this was for some old Ethernet network that is not needed any more (lesson in informing people about what is out there or labelling equipment and cables!!). Harry fetches a crimping tool and some connectors and I crimp a connector back on to my Ethernet cable.

I set up the firewall and the server in the corner of the room – fortunately it doesn't take up too much space and the installation goes of quite smoothly. Then I notice that the firewall interface does not communicate with the server PC – but the link to the switch and the wireless router are active. I also can't make contact with the wireless router on the roof. With that I call it a day realising that I will have to carry on on Saturday.

June 09, 2006 Mini macs in schools and Hospice connected again

Started our day at about 7:30AM - well at least I did – maybe Dwayne and Dare secretly set up a few more mesh nodes without me knowing at the crack of dawn. Noticed that wikipedia hadn't got very far – Dwayne started a parallel process to tar all the files and hopfully copy across some time later in the day – left the two machines whirring away.

First went to the school to turn on the wireless node which was usually unplugged. Met Mr Sehlabela and talked about what had been happening in the school over the last few months. He spoke about the donation from Eskom of a wireless server and wireless cards fot all the PC's in the lab. The contact person is at Eskom is Lucky: 0843223491, the box has www.magwireless.co.za written on it – they are a company that have set up a learning management system for school teachers. The system worked for a day until there was a power failure and then never worked again. <Dwayne – what else did he say?> I remember he just spoke about needing more help in the computer lab

We checked the box and found a Apple minimac with an external USB harddrive connected to a Netgear access point all powered from a UPS. Firstly the Ups wasn;t set to autostart when there is a power outage and the minimac is also not set to auto start when it get power from the UPS. It is very clear that there are no skills in the school to get things fixed when something goes wrong. The other concern is how Eskom could install a system which won't auto start after a power failure.

After fiddling around with the magwire system and thinking about all the better things we could do with a mac mini rather that use it as a server, we made our way to the hospice to get the replacement mesh node installed.

I did a check on the ground to make sure that the wireless and LAN interface was still working properly and discovered that one of the ports (the one that had power over ethernet activated) had been damaged during the fall at the begnning of the year. The only solution was to go and buy a soldering iron at the local hardware.

After a trip to the local bouhandelaar and our stomachs full of local laeveld greasy sausage, we returned to the hospice to finish our job. We re-jumpered the power over ethernet hack to another port, sealed up the box, aligned the grid antenna to Kok farm and finally installed everything onto the pole.

we were hoping to return to the school and demonstrate the new wikipedia on the mesh to Mr Sehlabela, but Wikipedia was still whirring away back at the clinic, so we left Dare to finish the cabling into the hospice and went to the school to at least get all the school lab Pc's linked up to the mesh.

We arrived at the school at about 12:50 and everyone had gone home except the headmaster and the caretaker -Mr Sehlabela had said he would be there until 1:30 but he was nowhere to be seen. The headmaster said we could go ahead and fix up the lab. We went in and hacked a lan card out of an old PC, stuck in in the main server, used windows to bridge the to LAN cards to that the mesh was bridged onto the school network and Voila! it worked. All the lab PC's got a DNS address from the linksys on the roof and could see the clinic – we couldn;t test wikipedia yet as it wasn;t finished copying, but at least we knew it would work in principle.

Now we were on a high – Dwayne went back to the clinic to try and finish setting up wikipedia and I picked up Agnes' refurb PC and went to pick up Dare. When I gopt to the hospice Dare had done a sterling job of the cabling and we proceeded to Agnes' house stocked with our gear. After some 4x4 driving with a Hyundai Getz – which Dare assured me was tame compared to Nigeria's roads we arrived at Agnes' house and started installing her new refurb (oxymoron there?) Everything went well until we noticed the Compaq refurn didn't have a standard 220V monitor plug at the back for the monitor – no problem I hacked a plug off my soldering iron a remade the monitor power cable to fit.

Switched on the PC, connected it to the mesh node and sadly – it didn't want start up the LAN interface using the built in LAN port. And the PS/2 mouse was very sticky and was almost unusable. So Dare and I zoomed backed to the clinic to find Dwayne still clunking away at the Wikipedia server – the sun was sinking low by now and so were our spirits – we decided to pack all our stuff into the Imperial's definition of a car with a large boot (a hatchback Getz) and go past Agnes, finish off the PC setup and head back to Pretoria. I grabbed a spare serial mouse and new network card and we made our way to the 4x4 track.

We got to Agnes' house at about 4:50 put the network card in and it still didn;t see the network. In desperation we decided to reinstall ubuntu, 40 minutes and throughts of angry wives later we had ubuntu running and it could see the network, but now for some reason the clinic node was down – probably the power supply getting bumbed out of the socked – well it was a “2 pronged plug from the dark side of the Universe power supply so it's not suprising”. And the serial mouse didn't work, and Agnes' login was incorreclty spelt Agnus and we were exhausted. We tried to show Agnes how to use the computer but the sticky mouse just made us angry and we decided to call it a day.

June 08, 2006 Imperialist Imperial car rental

David gets the Imperial car with a large boot at 4:40PM – 1 hour late. This large boot car is none other than a Hyundai Getz ... “Step away from the car mam – LAPD” type

Dwayne tried to copy the wikipedia files from his PC to the wikipedia server at home – but the PC ran out of hard drive space. After buying a new hard drive and starting the copy process on Thursday afternoon – it was taking too long and we had to take both machines with hoping to let it run over night at the clinic to be ready the next morning. We arrived at the clinic at about 10:00 PM and set up the machines at the accomodation block of the clinic and started the copy process again. David tried to fix Dwayne's weird linksys box but gave up and went to bed.

May 26, 2006 Wikipedia and scrapy old computers

Began work on setup of Wikipedia and setup of computer for Agnus. Very frustrating, ended up swapping drive, finding DVD ROMS not working, too little memory to unpack Wikipedia, etc. Lost most of the morning through this. We had decided that we really didn't want to visit people if we couldn't demo anything so tried to stick it out. Eventually gave up.

Skipped the school and Kok farm as we didn't have anything to show. Went straight to the Hospice. Got antennae aligned and box plugged in. No joy. Eventually took box down. This one was definitely toast. Took a long time to try get it down and diagnosed.

Left it at that for the day.

Returned to the clinic. Spoke briefly to Harry about connecting one of the staff who lives near the hospice. Seems close enough but probably no line-of-site. Also spoke about putting computer in the waiting room.

May 25, 2006 Meshy time again in Mpumalanga

Setup a temporary node on the clinic roof as the fibre has not yet been complete (fibre has been run but not yet terminated). Talked to Harry about the fibre and discussed when he expected it complete. Their IT guy is good but they don't bank it being complete on time.

Checked on the node on the clinic flats. Unplugged from our previous visit. Equipment functioning perfectly. We had to do a bit of thinking here as this node is terminated as a gateway node while the temporary one on the clinic is a normal node. Decided that our objective was to check the network so Internet connectivity was not a priority for this visit. Talked to Avery about her need for Internet – she spoke about the difficulty keeping contact with her children and grandchildren in Australia. The Internet is a lifeline for her to get pictures of family to not feel so far removed from them.

USAID node up! This one has been up for over a year, in the worst lightning area with no ill effects!

Visited the school, the teacher was not present but we made plans to see him the following day. Gained access to the school labs. They have installed wireless on each of the machines with what looks like a wireless hub. Our guess is that this is an intervention for lightning, but need to confirm that with the teacher. The link was disconnected but otherwise running perfectly. Outside people where repairing the satellite phones, we assume they were Telkom, unsure if this relates to the lab.

Visited the hospice. Antennae was pointing in the wrong direction. Our plug point has been coopted for something else. Searched for plug point. Spoke briefly to sister Shabalala.

Stopped as Agnus' house. Rains have made the road terrible. Took us about 15 minutes to travel 200m. The cantenna is pointing in the wrong direction and badly rusted. Checked on the equipment. Was half unplugged ie it had fallen from the socket but had essentially been left plugged in. It seemed like it did interfere with the booster antenna for the TV set.

Returned to clinic and met the fibre technicians. Spoke to Ray, the IT guy on the phone. Located the Wikipedia server – Ray had it. Spoke about what we were doing. Ray is still interested in supporting the network. Was very interested in what we had found out about static wikipedia as he supports 2 schools and would like to deploy it in those schools. He also gave some hints as to products he has used for managing bandwidth. Was very interested in what David wanted to do with BW management.

Decided to stop visits for the day and to test the network. KOK_FARM is up! We didn't manage to get to it today, but this means that they have not unplugged and that the equipment has survived. AGNUS is also up! A rusty cantenna pointed the wrong way works! We lost these a little while later as someone must have turned off the school.

Went into town and bought equipment so that we could ensure the school doesn't get switched off.

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.