Freemesh.ie - Bringing an equivalent to the german Freifunk Communities to Ireland.

It's christmas time .. and there's finally time to sit down and do 
something else than work or the usual stuff ...

I'm not sure, how many of ye have come across the german Freifunk 
(translates "Free Radiotransmission") Community.


Freifunk .. or the non-german equivalent "Freemesh" is a free Hotspot 
network. Anybody can participate and you can connect without having to 
register at any freifunk/freemesh hotspot.


The firmware for this network is based on OpenWRT (or LEDE in the future, 
which is an OpenWRT fork), so most embedded Linux router or even PCs can be 
used for this. A minimum specification is required though.


So I sat down the last few days and put the entire infrastructure for a 
rollout in Ireland in place. On top of that, the irish version comes with a 
bit of a kick: it will only use IPv6. There is a NATpt (or NAT64) gateway 
in place, so of course hosts, that are not IPv4 enabled can still be 
reached. The Freemesh software uses a self-healing mesh protocol based on 
B.A.T.M.A.N IV, so if enough other Freemesh routers are around, it will 
just recalibrate automatically, when one if it's "neighbors" disappears.


This is largely a modern incarnation, of what we used to have in the form 
of IrishWan/TheWan (http://www.thewan.net) over 10 years ago. The threshold 
to participate is much lower though.


And another little bonus: I've been landed with the entire stock of Fonera 
routers, that was emptied out of there warehouse, when they stopped selling 
to the public 2 years ago. 7 pallets of the stuff. Of those over 1200 are 
the Fonera 2.0n (or Fon2303A), which are usable for Freemesh. So for a 
small donation of 5 EUR (if collected in person or 10 EUR (if shipped), 
which goes towards running the Freemesh Ireland Gateway etc, you can get a 
pre-flashed router.


Happy xmas and a good new year.


/M

-- 
Irish Linux Users Group
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