[MLB-WIRELESS] Meraki Mini

[Dan Flett]

>Has anyone used a meraki mini? I am thinking of getting one however i would
>like to know some peoples past experiences with the unit, before i order
>one.

Hi Phil,

It depends on what you want to use it for.  If you want to hack/play with a 
new piece of gear, then I'd recommend buying one.  Buying just one from 
Meraki is a bit expensive though.

They are a purpose-built router/AP for mesh networking.  They come with a 
firmware that is designed to propogate Internet Access across the mesh with 
little or no configuration.  It's very good for distributing Internet Access 
to all nodes on the network, but maybe not so good for a network where the 
nodes want to communicate with each other.

My personal opinion of the Merakis is that they are the future of Community 
Networking in Australia, but not quite yet.  Here I envision them being used 
with Freifunk/OpenWRT, rather than the Meraki firmware.  The Meraki vendor 
firmware doesn't take into account the strict government regulations that 
surround the distribution of Internet in Australia.  It also doesn't seem to 
consider that nodes on the network might want to communicate with each other 
directly - but this needs to be tested.  The firmware certainly doesn't care 
anything about the Melbourne Wireless IP Address allocation system - if we 
used it on our network we'd run into all sorts of IP addressing issues.

Installing OpenWRT on the Meraki is a difficult, user-unfriendly process at 
the moment.  So the first big hurdle is sorting this out.  Reading the 
OpenWRT forums tells me that the OpenWRT Developers intend to write a new 
"stage2" bootloader for the Meraki that will make it a lot easier to load 
new firmware images.  Unfortunately I haven't heard much on this front 
lately - I hope they haven't forgotten about it...

Once this is sorted, we would want to get Freifunk or similar ported to 
OpenWRT Kamikaze - plans for this are already afoot.  So by the time OpenWRT 
is properly ported to the Meraki, we might be able to use Kamikaze/Freifunk 
straight away.

Cheers,

Dan