So cute, but full p2p wlan routers! Incredible!
On the village-telco mailinglist there were a lead about these Accton wlan mesh routers. The routers are not new, FON uses them extensively, but I decided to try them out. I ordered three of them from the open-mesh website and got them a week later. My first impression was: “Damn, so small!!”.
They came in a brown box each, no manual, just a power supply and a strange flat Ethernet cable. It was really just to plug them into an Internet connection and do all of the configuration on www.open-mesh.com’s Dashboard. Here you can edit the two SSIDs, one open and one private. On the open SSID you can configure a splash (welcome) page and if you want to use user authentication. You can choose from four commercial or if you have your own RADIUS server. I would believe FON would be one of these, but was not there. Probably you gotta flash the router with FON software, but that is probably a one-way road since FON has closed the SSH access.
The units were up and running from the box, I only had to type in the 5.x.x.x IP or MAC address to add the nodes to my network. I thought of what would happen with these unit if Open-Mesh put down their business, but was really relaxed reading their roadmap: Open Source management. Open-Mesh.com is supporting open-source mesh management solutions. We are contributing to a project being done at UNC Chapel Hill (http://orangemesh.sourceforge.net) to create a truly open-source management server for RO.B.IN mesh networks. It will automatically migrate your open-mesh networks to your own server without needing to re-enter data. We will re-integrate with that solution when it is complete and release our server as open-source as well (as one combined project). So stay tuned, these projects are both expanding and merging and will be completely open source.
Performance
I plugged a pc into the LAN port on one of the units directly linked to the one with Internet access. First I just managed to get 390/90 Kbit throughput, but realizing it was set a bandwidth limitations on it through the Dashboard. I set this to “0″, disablign it, and I was able to make up to 4Mbit throughput either ways. I found this very little to be a 802.11g WLAN. I will do further studies of what limits this traffic.
Security
There is no encryption as far as I know on the mesh connections. These are open-air traffic easy to sniff. There is a strong advice also to change the default root password on SSH through the Dashboard. If you put one of the routers on a public IP, anyone can SSH into it with the default password. They will then get a shell like this:
BusyBox v1.4.2 (2007-11-02 12:20:05 PDT) Built-in shell (ash) Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands. _______ ________ __ | |.-----.-----.-----. _ | |.-----.----| |__ | - || _ | -__| | |_| | | | || -__|__--| | |_______|| __|_____|__|__| |__|__|__||_____|____|__|__| |__| http://www.open-mesh.com --------------------- Powered by these open source projects: http://www.blogin.it http://kokoro.ucsd.edu/nodogsplash http://www.openwrt.org http://www.open-mesh.org http://www.olsr.org http://coova.org/ Version: r1421 2.6.21.5 -------------------------------------------------------------
