Hello everyone, this has been the slowest progressing week till now.
I happen to be cut out from the internet because of some hardware problem in my house. Never got to know a damn thing from the provider so there is no ETA for my comeback to the IRC channel. This week I did various tests on the available hardware, a PowerBeam AC400. The good news is that most of the configuration work is progressing nicely. We can configure the trivial part and most of the network part, what is left to do is now wireless and wireless encryption. As a good part of my time as been spent on finding the right way to work on the test I want to describe it. I set the antenna with the desired state and backup the configuration from the web interface or via ssh. This is our target file, there are some additional information that I rip off to leave only what should be the output from our tool. Next I take the state and replicate it with a netjson. I carefully set the network interfaces, the wireless interfaces and the vlans. This is the critical part as if the output is not correct I can't reach the antenna and I have to reset it, losing all the work. Then I use a script to diff the target configuration and the output from the tool to check how things are going. Then if there are no crucial differences I try to feed it to the antenna from ssh and start the configuration update sequence. More often than I would like I lose contact with the antenna and so I have to try more than once the configuration update procedure. Unfortunately this kind of hardware doesn't like to experience this cycle too much and after a few trial and error situation if refuses to communicate with me. After a short break without power it comes to life and we can begin again this dance. Obviously this has taken a toll on my patience and I tried thinking of a different approach. If I can attach with a serial interface I wouldn't be kicked off but this requires me to open the hardware and loose the hardware water resistance and void the warranty. This is obviously the best approach as a serial interface is the most stable method of communication between two piece of hardware. The other approach is to virtualize the hardware (a MIPS cpu and some other things) using QEMU or another cpu virtualization software. Unfortunately this goes against the terms and conditions of Ubiquity software so I would be legally layable of the consequences. That said if I can I will try and pry it open to connect to the glorious serial interfaces. As always, enjoy the weekend -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "OpenWISP" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
