• PlayDay20130209

Location: NodeWorldCup
Date and Time: Saturday, February 9, 2013, Noon to 5pm
Scribe: You
Roll Call: Them

Agenda

• Set up wifi meshes using openwrt and batman-adv on UbiquitiAirRouters and AcctonMR3201A

• Bring your laptop

• Bring your OpenWrt'able router

• Does anyone have a whiteboard they can bring?
• Or look over the shoulder of others

Notes

• Stuff Russell is bringing:
  • 1x whiteboard (thanks cseppa!)
  • 15x Accton MR3201A's with antennas and power supplies
  • 15x cat5 cables (flat white ones we received with the routers)
  • 1x 16-port 10/100 ethernet switch with power supply

  • 1x Buffalo WZR600DHP configured to provide ethernet from NodeWorldCup wifi and also enable parallel flashing of Acctons

  • 2x power strips

• Flashing Base OpenWrt onto Accton MR3201A: The Accton MR3201A devices have rather slow flash, and as a result, writing an image to them takes a considerable amount of time, approximately 15 minutes. In order to speed that process up, I configured a Buffalo WZR600DHP to flash 4 of them in parallel. The Buffalo was chosen because it has enough flash space of its own to persistently store the base image that is flashed on the Accton, and it has 4 LAN ports that can be configured as distinct interfaces. On the Buffalo, I used a basic Ar71Cab image, with the addition of the ap51-flash package and a custom configuration.

  • Buffalo flasher configuration changes
    • /etc/config/network:
      • switch configuration:

        config switch
                option name 'eth0'
                option reset '1'
                option enable_vlan '1'
        
        #config switch_vlan
        #        option device 'eth0'
        #        option vlan '1'
        #        option ports '0 1 2 3 4'
        
        config switch_vlan
                option device 'eth0'
                option vlan '1'
                option ports '0t 1'
        
        config switch_vlan
                option device 'eth0'
                option vlan '2'
                option ports '0t 2'
        
        config switch_vlan
                option device 'eth0'
                option vlan '3'
                option ports '0t 3'
        
        config switch_vlan
                option device 'eth0'
                option vlan '4'
                option ports '0t 4'

      • network interfaces:

        config 'interface' 'lan1'
                option 'ifname' 'eth0.1'
                option 'proto' 'static'
                option 'ipaddr' '192.168.11.1'
                option 'netmask' '255.255.255.0'
        
        config 'interface' 'lan2'
                option 'ifname' 'eth0.2'
                option 'proto' 'static'
                option 'ipaddr' '192.168.12.1'
                option 'netmask' '255.255.255.0'
        
        config 'interface' 'lan3'
                option 'ifname' 'eth0.3'
                option 'proto' 'static'
                option 'ipaddr' '192.168.13.1'
                option 'netmask' '255.255.255.0'
        
        config 'interface' 'lan4'
                option 'ifname' 'eth0.4'
                option 'proto' 'static'
                option 'ipaddr' '192.168.14.1'
                option 'netmask' '255.255.255.0'

    • /etc/config/dhcp add interfaces:

      #config dhcp priv
      #       option interface        priv
      #       option start            100
      #       option limit            150
      #       option leasetime        12h
      
      config dhcp lan1
              option interface        lan1
              option start            10
              option limit            200
              option leasetime        1h
      
      config dhcp lan2
              option interface        lan2
              option start            10
              option limit            200
              option leasetime        1h
      
      config dhcp lan3
              option interface        lan3
              option start            10
              option limit            200
              option leasetime        1h
      
      config dhcp lan4
              option interface        lan4
              option start            10
              option limit            200
              option leasetime        1h

    • create and populate /src with Accton image files:

      -rw-r--r-- 1 russell users    1411 Feb  8 17:59 md5sums
      -rw-r--r-- 1 russell users 2949120 Feb  8 17:59 openwrt-atheros-combined.squashfs.img
      -rw-r--r-- 1 russell users 1966080 Feb  8 17:59 openwrt-atheros-root.squashfs
      -rwxr-xr-x 1 russell users 2844736 Feb  8 17:58 openwrt-atheros-vmlinux.elf
      -rw-r--r-- 1 russell users 1310720 Feb  8 17:58 openwrt-atheros-vmlinux.gz
      -rw-r--r-- 1 russell users  917504 Feb  8 17:58 openwrt-atheros-vmlinux.lzma

    • add ap51-flash package to Buffalo
  • Flashing Accton's:

    • associate with MeshPlayDay

    • connect ethernet cables between the 4 LAN ports on the Buffalo and the Acctons
    • connect de-energized power strip's power supplies to the Acctons

    • login to Buffalo, N times (where N <= 4):  ssh root@10.11.25.1 

    • in each shell:

      cd /src 
      ap51-flash eth0.N openwrt-atheros-root.squashfs openwrt-atheros-vmlinux.lzma

      where N is the LAN port number
    • when each shell's ap51-flash has started, energize the power strip
    • confirm each of the ap51-flash's has detected its Accton and has begun flashing
    • wait about 15 minutes for ap51-flash to complete, the Accton to reboot, and the firstboot sequence to complete
    • for each Accton:
      • remove the Accton from the ethernet cable
      • connect to a laptop via ethernet (with a staticly configured 192.168.1.2/24 interface)
      • confirm that the Accton answers telnet at 192.168.1.1.

The above is for reference. Russell has pre-flashed the Acctons as far as this. The remainder of the notes indicate the steps needed to install and configure batman-adv on the Accton's to participate in a mesh.

[CategoryMeetingNotes]