[d-star] A Portable Mesh Network?

[Peter Corbett]

On 2013-Jul-06 21:10 , Doug Reed wrote:
> Of course if you install Linux on the laptops or other computers, then
> the mesh software just becomes a matter of selecting which flavor you
> want and going through the install and configure process. I haven't
> looked to see if there is mesh software pre-configured in any standard
> Linux release. I know it is in routers like the WRT54GL and similar,
> but I don't know if anyone had made it part of a standard desktop or
> laptop distro. It can be compiled, installed, and configured on any
> Linux flavor, it just would be nice to find the work already done....

The OLSR software we're using is in the standard repositories for Debain
and Ubuntu.

> The other question was can you use the mesh with any standard network.
> As far as I know, the answer if no. If you are running mesh, it is
> seen as an ad-hoc network and no laptop client can associate with it
> since they are usually running in Infrastructure mode..... I least
> that is the way I read the articles....

The mesh routing portion will work in Infrastructure mode... until you
go out of range of any access points. Ad-hoc is the only
commonly-supported mode that lets arbitrary machines see each other.

A plain laptop can associate to the mesh's ad-hoc SSID, but you'll need
to set the IP manually, and you won't be able to route to anywhere, or
talk to anyone outside your local neighbors. You need the OLSR meshing
to get the multi-hop and cross-subnet routing.

-- 
Peter Corbett :: KD8GBL
peter at corbettdigital.net