Suspend vs Network Traffic - blockers

[John Gilmore]

Deepak,

>>> Would this be considered a blocker for 8.2 ...

(Not my call.)

>>> or do we primarilly
>>> care about collaboration in mesh mode for deployments?

Very few deployments use mesh mode, because it currently doesn't scale
up to more than about ten nearby laptops.  (It's due to many interactions
between the mesh firmware, the use of multicast presence packets, and
the limited bandwidth available on WiFi.  We have had numerous
fundamental bugs in these areas -- many of which you've seen referred
to in this thread -- and are only now being able to re-test after
months of effort spent trying to fix some of those bugs.)

So OLPC's recommended configuration with more than 10 laptops in a
school is to have one (or more) 802.11 access point, and have the
XO's use it in ordinary WiFi mode.  Some places have school servers,
some don't.  When there is a school server, it's sitting on a
wired Ethernet attached to the WiFi routers.

Due to the mesh/multicast overload problems, very few Active Antennas
are in use in deployments, as I understand it.  And I'm pretty sure
that very few deployments use any kind of WiFi network interface
directly inside the school server; they use Ethernet there.

This page is the best reference for deployment scenarios:

  http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Networking_scenarios

(It even says ("Troublesome Scenario: Simple WiFi") that an access
point without a school server is problematic with more than a few
XO's, because the XO's will use multicast for presence detection, and
802.11 access points tend to use low speed 1Mbps transmissions for
multicast packets.  With a school server there, the XO's will not use
multicast, they'll use ordinary high speed unicast packets to and from
the presence service in the school server.)

	John