[Interop-dev] a crazy little thing called yaffmap

[Guido Iribarren]

Absolutely amazing. I've had for the past few weeks a 'mental
wishlist' of info / reports i'd like to get from nodes, and was about
to improvise some crude scripts when i had time, but it seems you
implemented them all and in a proper way!
Will definitely check it out on spare time this weekend, ...and maybe
even contribute back an agent script for batman-adv?

Cheers!
Free software is great :)

guido

On 4/25/12, Dennis Bartsch <(spam-protected)> wrote:
>
>
>
> Hello Community,
>
> I am from Freifunk Berlin and would like to introduce to you an
> implementation of a node database I started with a friend we call yaffmap.
> It got its name because at that time we have had many mapservers in Berlin
> and so it started as yet another approach for a Freifunk map.
>
> The intention was to make a server that not just produces points and lines
> (nodes and their links) but to gather all information that might
> help to understand why a link is as bad as it is. This includes to gather
> wireless scan results, the effective rate chosen/calculated by the
> wireless driver to a specific neighbour and so on. Furthermore it had to be
> independent from the routing-protocol and its daemons (but
> needs it to gather useful info) and the IP version (or even no IP version
> for RPs like batman) and had to be able to upload and store data
> from multiple routing protocols on the same node. In order to sample so much
> information we went the route of scripting an agent for the
> map-server which runs on the nodes gathering the information and uploading
> it through a JSON interface to the server. For link-state-protocols
> like OLSR we even implemented the upload of the global topology to the
> server, which gave us some headache. From the beginning on
> I stressed the need for decentralized operation, so replication between the
> servers was implemented and any community which wants can
> have their own map data server. Moreover I cleary wanted the
> datacollection/storage to be independent from the frontend the map user is
> presented. In Berlin everytime a new map came along and an old one was gone
> we saw huge ammounts of data simply disappear. So the
> server only provides a SOAP interface for UIs and other services to use to
> get map data. The representation of a node in the database ist
> best seen on a graphic. I uploaded it to imageshack, see [1]. A little bit
> of documentation is found under [2], but wasn't thoroughly updated
> after we left concept stage.
>
> We got to the point where the agent (bunch of shell/AWK) for the nodes runs
> on openWRT (best with madwifi and ath9k/ath5k) with olsrd
> (other routing daemons simply need scripts for data gathering, agent is held
> modular), uploades many useful information to the server (or
> another if the first does not respond; multiple can be configured) using
> JSON, where it gets stored correctly into a SQL database and replicated
> to other servers and provided through a SOAP interface. The agent even is
> already provided as a package in the respected PBerg Freifunk
> Firmware. There also exists a 'proof-of-concept' implementation for a map
> frontend, see [3]. The code is hosted on github as seen und [4].
> Because of the frontend development got stuck the frontend SOAP interface is
> not very sophisticated nor much tested as is the frontend itself.
>
> The result is a database which can answer more complex question to the mesh
> engineer or software developer than every I took a look at.
> Maybe you want to know the average effective rate on all 11n interfaces or
> all 5GHz interfaces? Or you might be interested in the average
> ETX on different channels in a certain geographic area. Or you want to
> compare how different routing daemons evaluate the quality of a
> certain link. Maybe you even want to draw a noise map. Or wouldn't it be
> interesting to see the correlation between the effective rate of a
> wifi link and the metrics which result in the routing daemons?
>
> Because the node data includes a 'misc' field through which any kind of node
> id or statistics could be stored/sent this is can even be integrated
> into existing community portals.
>
> Hope you find this interesting
> Dennis
>
> [1] http://imageshack.us/f/21/bildschirmfotovom201204.png/
> [2] http://wurststulle.dyndns.org/yaffmap/trac/wiki/DocumentationIndex  (Be
> patient. It is dripping through an ADSL upload)
> [3] http://yaffmap.basicinside.de/vendor/yaffmap-map/
> [4] https://github.com/wurststulle/yaffmap-backend
>     https://github.com/wurststulle/yaffmap-agent
>     https://github.com/wurststulle/yaffmap-map
> [5] some statistics: http://wurststulle.dyndns.org/yaffmap/
>