Open-Mesh

To those of you who actively follow the recent discussions it may come to no big surprise that it was decided to remove the vis functionality from the batman-adv kernel module in a not so distant future (with the next compatibility bump). There always has been a debate whether or not such functionality belongs into the kernel or not. The in-kernel solution bears the disadvantage of being rather inflexible because every change has to go through the official Linux channels. With the growing interest in flooding the network with arbitrary data in addition to the visualization data realizing a solution in user-space became the obvious choice.

A new, more general user-space daemon which takes over the old vis functionality and much more, called A.L.F.R.E.D. (Almighty Lightweight Fact Remote Exchange Daemon) came to life. Alfred is capable of distributing information over your mesh network in a decentralized fashion, for example graph information for vis, but also any other data which appears to be useful - like hostnames, phone books, administration information, DNS information, the local weather forecast, etc while requiring (almost) zero configuration.

As the development on the core functionality has been finished and alfred works (at least on the developers boxes), we would like to call for an open beta! There are bleeding edge downloads and an OpenWRT feed available. Please try alfred and report bugs, send patches and inform us about your experiences. Alfred will be release along with the next batman-adv release.

Happy routing,

The B.A.T.M.A.N. team