search

freifunk-gluon / gluon

a modular framework for creating OpenWrt-based firmwares for wireless mesh nodes
https://gluon.readthedocs.io
Other
548 stars 324 forks source link

SSID can be changed in config-mode and survives sysupgrade #141

Closed baranator closed 9 years ago

baranator commented 10 years ago

We discussed the following during one of our meetings:

In general and probably especially in rural areas people identify theirselves quite strong with their cities, (small-)towns and villages. Therefore an SSID for the Freifunk-Wlan, that has a direct and individual association to the local place, where the router is set up, maybe would help to gain a better acceptance and publicity. For sure this is already possible with gluon but you either need several site-configs, adapted images and corresponding autoupdater-servers or a manual editing of the SSID on the router. Both is in my opinion quite much effort, for such a small but - to some people important - detail. Especially if there is a freifunk-community that works well and has a wide catchment area and sees no need for splitting itself up in smaller local communities or run a couple of dozen firmware-builders and update-servers this would be a nice feature if the SSID could be altered in config-mode and kept altered during firmware-updates.

Opinions?

neocturne commented 10 years ago

In my opinion, everything using compatible images (which use the same VPN backbone) should use the same SSID, so roaming can work. It doesn't make sense to make this configurable by the user as it will be used by people who change this to their "personal" Freifunk SSID whichout understanding they break the network that way.

You should either try to find an SSID everyone is happy with, or use a modified site.conf for every subdivision. The latter case also has the advantage that it's simpler to split up the network by updating some subdivisions with a new VPN backbone when the network becomes to big (we've just had such a case near Lübeck, some northern parts which were using Freifunk Lübeck images have now founded Freifunk Ostholstein to reduce the mesh size)

bjo81 commented 10 years ago

For some (sub)communities (eg. in East Frisia) it is unintelligible to use a name of a town in their SSID which is about 80km away, but they have not enough manpower to run their own infrastructure. One idea was to put an array of selectable SSIDs in the site.conf, so someone can choose the SSID of their town / rural district. Sure, it would be a bad idea if everyone could put "iwillbreakroaming.freifunk.net" in configmode. But we also thought about splitting the mesh into East Frisa and Oldenburg or create a big "nordwest"-mesh; but some small towns would rather have their own SSID.

tcatm commented 10 years ago

If the network covers a large area freifunk.net might be a suitable ESSID.

mischpoCHE commented 10 years ago

hi!

having different ssid for different towns is heavily wanted by quite a few members of our community (lüneburg). especially uelzen and winsen are not happy to promote freifunk.lueneburg.net, because innkeepers and other people in their town have a very special kind of local patriotism. uelzen is building is own community now (it is a better solution, than changing the ssid, as we all know), but there aren't so many freifunker in each other town, to go this way. a configurable drop down list sounds quite nice to me.

one question: will changing the ssid only break roaming? or will it break meshing, too?

in our case, there possibly will never be roaming and meshing between routers in winsen and lüneburg, for example.

cheers, claas

2014-07-25 18:57 GMT+02:00 Nils Schneider notifications@github.com:

If the network covers a large area freifunk.net might be a suitable ESSID.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/freifunk-gluon/gluon/issues/141#issuecomment-50175859 .

neocturne commented 10 years ago

No, it won't break meshing. Nevertheless, the config mode should only contain options that are supposed to be configured by the end user. Every option that is common to a whole community or subdivision belongs into the site.conf.

I don't see why the ESSID must even contain some city name at all; it should contain the community name. And if the community doesn't only operate in a single city, using the city name is obviously wrong. A name like "Freifunk NDS Nord" or something like that might be more appropriate, or use the Landkreis names like Freifunk Ostholstein.

baranator commented 10 years ago

because innkeepers and other people in their town have a very special kind of local patriotism.

That's what i wanted to say. ;) It's up to you if you can can relive or like it or not (I myself do rather not), but imho approaching this attitudes could offer a chance to reach people that are not reached now