[MLB-WIRELESS] Meraki Mini

[Phil k]

Fair enough, yeah i always like playing around with a new piece of gear so i 
might still consider getting one. But i will soon be moving to Taylors Hill 
and i will want to connect to a node, but to connect to a node i think i 
will buy a wrt54gl or another buffalo whr hp 54g if i can track one down.




>From: "Dan Flett" <conhoolio at hotmail.com>
>To: hakzor_x1 at hotmail.com, melbwireless at melbournewireless.org.au
>Subject: RE: [MLB-WIRELESS] Meraki Mini
>Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2007 17:20:59 +1100
>
>>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
>
>

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