[Cerowrt-devel] engaging developers and users [#314]

[Dave Taht]

our anti-phishing system kicked back on the numeric urls in this, fixed now.

The reason why cerowrt lives on the 172 dot 30 dot 42 dot X address is that
it had been my hope that others working on this project would plug *two*
routers into their home network - one for the day-to-day effort of keeping
their internet access up and running (on 192 dot 168 dot zero dot one), and
a cerowrt box for analyzing both routers behavior.

*I* don't run it as my day-to-day device at the moment. From where I sit,
it's a test tool - an increasingly good one - for coming up with solutions
to bufferbloat, and fixing the whole home router disaster with things like
ipv6, proxying, dns, etc... it has oprofile, and debugging tools by
default, etc, etc.

I had planned to get to where we had stable releases that could be used
day-to-day, but it's been a while since we had one, and I feel that we're
going to make some progress on the core bufferbloat problem next quarter,
and not have a stable release.

I'm GLAD to have users and testers - some generations of cerowrt are
running for people like jg, esr, & each, and have enormous stability and
uptimes - I don't know who else is running a generation of cerowrt
day-to-day frankly, there's been a lot of downloads - but there will always
be something broken in a smoketest or rc, that may not be able to be fixed
very quickly. Or something crazy we're doing - like routing vs bridging -
that exposes a problem that we needed to know about....

Recently, that happened with samba. And while I hope that's fixed now (in a
couple ways - wins appears to be working, and I also have a largely
untested samba 3.6.1 package, it needs to get tested at some point in next
year's development cycle)

http://www.bufferbloat.net/issues/314
http://www.bufferbloat.net/issues/303

I'd really like to use samba again personally, I used to use it a lot.
These days I tend to use sshfs, and that's zillions of times slower than
samba.

Having a user support community and people testing release candidates and
smoketests is very important to me, too! I LOVED finding out how to make
samba work right...

So, high on my list is coming up with a proper way of stressing what's on
the front page of the documentation, and setting (low!) expectations, and
keeping people engaged...

From: http://cero2.bufferbloat.net/cerowrt/

"CeroWrt <http://cero2.bufferbloat.net/cerowrt/about.html> is an
OpenWrt<http://www.openwrt.org/>router platform for use by
individuals, researchers, and students
interested in advancing the state of the art on the Internet. Specifically,
it is aimed at investigating the problems of latency under load,
bufferbloat, wireless-n<http://cero2.bufferbloat.net/cerowrt/tcp.html#wireless>,
QoS <http://cero2.bufferbloat.net/cerowrt/tcp.html#qos>, and the effects of
various TCP algorithms
<http://cero2.bufferbloat.net/cerowrt/tcp.html#tcp>on shared
networks."

If there is some place in the doc where we are not putting up large warning
signs - 'BUGS AHEAD. DANGEROUS CODE. DON'T EXPERIMENT WITH THIS ON WIVES OR
CHILDREN' - I'd to find it and fix it.

I'm perfectly happy with the hardware and core software itself at this
point. I wasn't, this time last year.

I'd like everybody in the open source and network research communities to
get TWO routers based on this chipset for christmas! Use one day to day,
running openwrt, and the other experimenting with a future outlined by the
ideas in cerowrt.

1) I'd like to come up with a good way for people to plug this in as a
'secondary' router.

Right now that requires turning off nat, and telling the upstream router to
give the cerowrt router a static ip and route to the 172 dot 30 dot 42 dot
0 slash 24 address. Perhaps we can take some screenshots of how to do that
on more common CPE?

Network renumbering involves running a couple line sed script.

http://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/cerowrt/wiki/Default_network_numbering

I hope to make renumbering a router easier with a gui, but you know, it's a
3 line sed script and a couple hundred lines of gui to write to make that
easier.
I'm also thinking of merely writing an RFC standardizing that 192 dot 168
dot zero dot 1 should be the number ALL routers come up on, and the number
all home networks should use. For april 1st.

Bridging is also possible... but not very.

2) Another thought is to do builds of the ceropackages repository for
straight openwrt, and point people at that for things like the bleeding
edge samba stuff.

I like ceropackages, it's a good way to spin up and debug a new package,
with a low barrier to entry for new people to openwrt - after which it has
always been my intent to push the stable stuff upstream. Multiple grad
students have used the ceropackages concept to get up to speed somewhat and
steve walker's been great about polishing those up. (and also submitting
packages of his own)

3) Is to more aggressively push up the stuff that works into std openwrt.
This is currently blocked by something stupid

http://www.bufferbloat.net/issues/319

or convince someone to push the stable stuff up to openwrt on a regular
basis.

5) Increase the number of people doing active development and able to fix
bugs and documentation.

Any other ideas as to accomplish these mutually incompatable goals - gain
developers, increase the userbase, gain testers,get good day to day and
long term resolve, solve bufferbloat, establish world peace, and be able to
do bleeding edge R&D... are welcomed.

I do not ever want to disappoint people with our efforts, and will work
diligently at fixing every problem exposed by the new stuff we're doing.
One of my first thoughts was pretty simple in this area though - try to do
less new stuff!

-- 
Dave Täht
SKYPE: davetaht
US Tel: 1-239-829-5608
FR Tel: 0638645374
http://www.bufferbloat.net
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