Lately I've continued with the testing that I began for the latest Battle Mesh to check that the Community-Lab testbed and CONFINE software in general are actually usable for the participants of the first Open Call. I've sent even more bug reports, but this time Axel (who fortunately restrained himself from chasing and hitting me) has had time to fix some of them so we've been in a tight loop of test-report-fix-test.
The good news is that I find the testbed in its current state to be quite usable, at least for a trusted set of researchers with close assistance from testbed developers and administrators. I even found VCT to be working (as a container!) for running test experiments, albeit some bugs which make it not work out of the box. Another important factor in usability is having good documentation but I'm afraid we're still green on that, although Davide is working on updating the BitTorrent tutorial, and documentation and support is one of this year's objectives.
As an specially interesting result of testing, yesterday I checked that isolated sliver interfaces (i.e. VLAN-tagged, see the node architecture) on top of ad hoc wireless interfaces seem to work flawlessly. The ad-hoc interfaces were configured in the research device like this:
config wifi-device radio0
option type mac80211
option channel 11
option macaddr 00:08:ca:42:3e:64
option hwmode 11ng
option htmode HT20
list ht_capab SHORT-GI-40
list ht_capab TX-STBC
list ht_capab RX-STBC1
list ht_capab DSSS_CCK-40
# REMOVE THIS LINE TO ENABLE WIFI:
# option disabled 1
config wifi-iface
option device radio0
option mode adhoc
option bssid 02:CA:FF:EE:BA:BE
option ssid community-lab.net
option encryption none
Then I gave the isolated interfaces a couple of IP addresses in the same network to test connectivity. This kind of setup with no central access point should be most interesting for running routing experiments in a cloud of nearby nodes that have direct visibility. Hats off to Axel Neumann for his work on node software!
In other topics, I was also reviewing the node storage layout to update it to use an initial OpenWrt system and kexec. In some ways it looks cleaner and simpler to me in spite of the chained boot, let's hope that there aren't many hurdles with the implementation.
So all in all things are looking great! :)