Question about the system

[mitar]

I have not found any mailing list for the project or other contact information, so I am opening a ticket here. Sorry if I missed something.

I am one of developers of nodewatcher community networks deployment systems, similar to this project, and we are doing a survey of similar tools. We have this spreadsheet we are trying to fill:

https://goo.gl/JbD4VC

I would like to verify some information. The spreadsheet was made by various contributions and after checking the code we could not find where some features are.

(Please feel free to verify all columns for the guifi.net entry.)

• Does this system have a firmware generator? This is the ability to generate flashable preconfigured firmware images for devices. So that you can for example through the web interface select configuration and then a firmware image is built for you with that configuration baked in?
• We are curious about modularity and extensibility of the project. If I understand correctly, it is build upon Drupal so it can uses Drupal modularity. But is the project using that to allow custom modules to extend the core functionality? For example:
  • Can modules simply extend the monitoring functionality with new features? For example, a module could add a feature to check if frequencies used by nodes match the legal requirements.
  • Can the firmware configuration code be extended for new platforms by modules? Currently it seems only like a set of premade files?
• Does the system support monitoring various routing protocols? Can they be added in a modular fashion?

I am just asking this questions because we would like to be see which features community networks use and which do not. So it is not a problem if some of things mentioned in the list this project does not have, maybe your community do not need those features, or it was just not yet implemented. We are just curious to see what different communities use. So if you could help us understand more about this project that would be great.

cc @kostko

[PabloCastellano]

Hey @mitar. Thanks for bringing here this discussion.

Fortunately or unfortunately we also started this collection of features of other maps some months ago and you can find the results here: http://pool.wiki.guifi.net/wiki/Comparison_of_maps
I think we should merge both tables!

About your questions, these are the answers to the best of my knowledge. Maybe @miquelmartos can complete this information with something else:

• This drupal module doesn't contain any firmware generator. However it provides a configuration generator that generates a configuration file for some versions of openwrt/AirOs/RouterOS. Flashing custom firmwares has not been very common between Guifi.net users.
• Yes, it is extendable and we are happy to receive pull requests.
• I would say it's not supported right now but the module could be extended to support it.

[mitar]

Thanks for reply. There is also this wiki: http://interop.wlan-si.net/ So many places to put stuff. :-)