OLSR Dot Draw

A perl script, found at Meshcube, which makes use of the OSLR Dot topology information plugin was used as a 1st cut tool to visualise the networks.

Original Source

The visualisation produced interesting images showing the complexity of mesh networking. The placement of nodes in the script is done using several algorithms and therefore aren't definately related to the nodes spacial position. We wanted a better feeling of what was going on in the 49-node Indoor Mesh and it therefore was necessary to edit the script to fix the positions of the nodes according to their grid positions. This was accomplished by instructing the script to first look at a header file for position information before drawing the links.

Our version of the script will be added here and our header file here.

To use the visualisation you will need to install the following packages:

• graphviz
• imagemagick

Install the Olsr Dot Draw Plugin (on a WRT54G for example):

ipkg install olsrd-libs

Then assuming that you've installed the plugin, add the following line to /etc/olsrd.conf

LOAD_PLUGIN olsrd_dot_draw.so.0.1

then restart olsr and check if you get output on port 2004 by typing:

telnet localhost 2004

Thereafter you can run the script by typing: ./olsr-topology-mesh-lab.pl

or as we do to get the funky colours and info from a lab node: ./olsr-topology-mesh-lab.pl --server meshy.dhcp --noshow --fontsize 14 --size 10,10 --port 2005 --bgcolor blue