Wireless:Opennet firmware
From 22C3
You can contact me in the Art & Beauty - area - behind the LEGO-bricks.
Opennet Firmware
In Rostock's WLAN-Network Opennet - a net with now more than hundred nodes in the north of germany - we had very good experiences with the Freifunk-Firmware. But once we decided to switch to OpenVPN, we had the problem that OpenVPN on the recent Freifunk implementation didnt worked on the ASUS WL500g Router, which we on the other hand declared as 'supported'.
At this time the recent OpenWRT-Firmware (whiterussian) did support OpenVPN on the ASUS but didn't gave us such an easy way to configure the Access-Point the way all our un-hackish-users liked it. Also typical users didnt liked the way we described them to create Keys on the command line, so something had to be changed.
Features
We decided to go our own way and created a mixture of OpenWRT whiterussian and the Freifunk-Firmware with some additional features. Once into it, we added some other things we really liked:
- Area with only those Options which had to be changed after installing
- OpenVPN WebInterface for Key/Certifikate Management
- Port-Forwarding Webinterface
- WEP-Key Management Area
Future
This way we made it very easy for new users, to start participating in our Network. So staying in the Freifunk-Luxury and building features in to that was one reason, that our net expanded so fast. Now we have some new challanges for the Opennet-Firmware:
- Auto-Adapt Transmitting Power to the lowest limit to reach next Stations
- Sync Internet-Gateway- and OpenVPN-Tunnel Selection, add Gateway whitelist / blacklist
If you are interested to see what we have done so far, visit the Project Website (german) or check the SVN for the sources.
