802.11s portals

[Dan Williams]

On Wed, 2007-03-28 at 00:29 -0400, scott at gnuveau.net wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> Does the Marvel chip have the capability to connect to standard
> 802.11a/b/g access points, or is that the issue raised here?

Yes, it does have the capability to do that (and the XOs are using that
capability).  I believe the OP was asking about how people could
construct their own mesh portals that an OLPC laptop would use to
connect to the internet over mesh.  Right now nobody outside OLPC can do
that because nobody has the USB dongle that the mesh-enabled firmware
runs on, and even though the XBox 360 wireless adapters are essentially
the same hardware, they don't work for some reason.

We only have USB reference dongles which aren't suitable for real use,
plus the fact that they are not in large production runs makes them
unsuitable for wide use anyway.  We'll obviously have to figure out
something.

Another solution would be to implement an 802.11s stack that understands
the XO's specific 802.11s implementation in the kernel's mac80211
stack/framework that would run on any softmac card.  That takes a bit of
work though :)

Dan

> Scott
> 
> On Wed, 28 Mar 2007, Dan Williams wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, 2007-03-27 at 16:53 -0700, MBurns wrote:
> > > List: correct me if I am wrong.
> > >
> > > As far as I know, the best first step is an Xbox 360 Wireless Adapter
> > > [1]. They use the same Marvell chip that the OLPC uses, and it would
> > > stand to reason that a Linux+Marvell setup for the OLPC would work
> > > reasonably well in a generic Linux desktop machine with an Xbox
> > > adapter dongle. Any progress to this in would be very interesting.
> >
> > The XBox dongles, while also apparently 8388-based, don't actually work
> > with the driver or the firmware.  We're not sure if there is additional
> > hardware in them, or if they have different Boot2 firmware that checks
> > signatures of the real firmware, or what.  More experimentation and
> > possibly reverse engineering is necessary to figure out how to upload
> > firmware to the XBox dongles.
> >
> > The standard setup (for now) is an XO with a USB Ethernet dongle and the
> > internal 8388.  Bring up the ethernet device, configure the msh0
> > interface as AdHoc, give it an SSID, a channel, and an IP address, and
> > start the 'mpp.py' script.
> >
> > We'll be plugging 8388 USB dongles into larger servers, but these
> > dongles are Marvell reference boards and not suitable for production or
> > long-term use since they are not environmentally sealed, don't have RF
> > cans, and only have 1 antenna connection point.
> >
> > Dan
> >
> > > Any other ideas?
> > >
> > > [1] http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=xbox+360+wireless
> > > +adapter&hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=com.ubuntu:en-US:official&hs=srf&um=1&sa=X&oi=froogle&ct=title
> > >
> > > On 3/27/07, Aaron Kaplan <aaron at lo-res.org> wrote:
> > >         Sorry if this has been asked before, but...
> > >         (I asked on irc)
> > >
> > >         I am currently researching how to connect the 802.11s mesh
> > >         points via
> > >         portals the the net. So far I found no single PCI or any other
> > >         card
> > >         that you could plug into a normal linux PC/server. How are you
> > >         people
> > >         currently configuring a portal ? Do you plug in a USB ethernet
> > >         device ?
> > >
> > >         So, in other words: how to construct a 802.11s portal server?
> > >
> > >         If this has been asked before, I would be very happy about
> > >         pointers.
> > >
> > >         thanks,
> > >         aaron.
> > >
> > >         _______________________________________________
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> > >         Devel at laptop.org
> > >         http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > --
> > > Michael Burns * Security Student
> > > NET * Oregon State University
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