802.11s portals

[scott at gnuveau.net]

On Wed, 28 Mar 2007, Dan Williams wrote:

> 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).

Whew!  I thought someone had made a walled garden for a moment.

> 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.
>

There is a similar chip in the sony psp, an 88W8010, for which there is a
linux port currently underway (full framebuffer console + ir keyboard
support at the moment, uclinux varient for mipsel w/o a mmu)... since we
are playing with gaming gear:)  Could potentially be a mesh node with a
bit of work.

> 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 :)
>

Indeed, but it appears well worth it.

Thanks,
Scott

> 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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>