There are NO alerts at this time.
There are NO alerts at this time.
Note - this report is written from a Southern California perspective. Depending on your location, as they say YMMV!
During the test the node count on the linked networks locally rose to around 1,090. N2MH's N2MH-Hub saw 1428, most likely a record for an AREDN network.
Observations:
As we hoped, network storms never appeared from our West Coast point of view, and none have been reported to date. Network traffic was not substantially higher than normal. Using KN6PLV's Mesh Monitor, messages per second were averaging about 600 before the test. During the test it hovered closer to 700. Most of the increase in traffic was due to OLSR routing broadcasts, which each node has to handle.
As we expected, older devices struggled. Many wound up with a load significantly greater than 1 (which is a full load for a single-CPU device like these), indicating their CPUs were struggling to keep up with their pending processes. Ssh'ing into a few of them and running top showed that with node counts around 1,000, loads of around 4-5 were seen.
Things we didn't expect:
While the slower nodes struggled with displaying UI pages, they were usually still able to pass traffic. But occasionally that older hardware bogged down so much that it couldn't. Perhaps some effort should be made to prioritize traffic handling...
We've wrapped up the Meshoween network abuse test :-).
If you participated and have any specific observations, please pass them along to me (orv.beach@gmail.com) and they'll be rolled them into the report on the test.
tl;dr - it went pretty well - a few surprises.
As an AREDN network grows in size and/or complexity, it will eventually encounter a packet storm that would pretty much cripple its traffic-carrying capabilities until the storm fades out, which could be hours. (The writers of the OLSR mobile routing protocol probably never envisioned it having to handle networks of the size amateurs are creating.) This is significantly limiting the growth and performance of our networks.
Recently released nightly build 571 provides a substantial amount of resistance to these storms. As a test of the network's robustness (or not) Saturday October 30th at 9 a.m. local we'll attempt to link as many AREDN networks together as possible.
We did a 'test test' earlier in the week on the West Coast when the Southern California and Bay area networks were linked. Node counts got up to a bit over 800 and few reports were received, so we're ready for Saturday!
Test preparation
Prior to Saturday's test, it's recommended that in order to protect your node(s) that you upgrade them to the latest nightly build (599 as of this writing). This is especially important on nodes that pass data through (as opposed to being an end-point on a network).
Also prior to Saturday, establish some baseline performance measurements on your network. Suggestions are:
Folks, next Saturday is Meshoween, where nasty packet storms strike terror into the most experienced ham network user :-)
Seriously, we'll be linking up big and small networks to see how our ham radio networks handle huge routing table broadcasts.
If you haven't yet updated your node(s) to nightly build 571 (or later), please seriously consider doing so. It will help your node fight off any scary packet storms!
Monitoring instructions will be promulgated a day or two prior to Meshoween.
There will be two AREDN presentations at the 17th Annual Southern California Linux Expo – SCALE 17X – to be held on March 7-10, 2019 at the Pasadena Convention Center in Pasadena, California, near Los Angeles.
Both presentations will be on Sunday afternoon, March 10 in room 212.
The first talk by Orv Beach, W6BI is titled “The Ham Radio Internet - a Progress Report”. It will start at 15:00 in Room 212.
Orv reports that IP Networking is one of the fastest growing modes in amateur radio. The ham radio internet (lower-case eye) continues to grow in both capabilities and span. Driven by improvements in custom open source software for wireless access points by AREDN (arednmesh.org) and with their support of more equipment from more vendors, it now covers from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border and east at least to the Inland Empire. At any given time, there are more than 300 nodes up and running.
He will detail that growth with emphasis on Southern California, with metrics, maps and graphs. He'll also cover some of the more significant network events, including...
Andre, K6AH, will present an update on the AREDN team's open source software development progress and report on useful tools and techniques to ensure a successful mesh network implementation. His talk "AREDN Project: New developments in software and successful implementations around the Southwestern Division " will be given on Saturday, February 16, 2019 at 11:40 am. Andre will describe new Emcom applications which make the mesh even more usable.
The Yuma Hamfest and ARRL Southwestern Division Convention will be held on Friday and Saturday, February 15 & 16, 2019 at the Yuma County Fairgrounds, 2520 E. 32nd Street, Yuma, AZ 85365. For more information, see the Yuma Hamfest website. For tickets and vendor registrations, see their online registration form.
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