WontMesh

Category:Sasecurity
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=== Node not meshing ===
do the nodes in town see the node with the panel antenna directly? 
if so, run sigspy from both town and panel ends and see what values you 
get for signal and for noise 
- the diff should be at least +7dB and stable, otherwise it won't work 
reliably. 
What does reporter say also? 
what does cat /proc/aodv/monitor say? 
You have changed out the antenna, but have you checked out the pigtails 
and antenna RF cabling and connectors? 
Did you use self-amalgamating tape to properly seal these RF 
elements? 
If not then water can get into the cable and intermittently short out 
the signal so it fails to reach the panel! 
Otherwise, bite the bullet and upgrade to a more recent release - been 
running nodes on version 1274 (getandverify tobuild25dev90) for a good month now 
hereabouts and it works well 
- there are all kinds of issues with some of the earlier releases of 
the meshap code 
- just remember if you do upgrade to work from the outside of your mesh 
inwards and do your gateway/s last :) 
Lastly, all your nodes in the same mesh are on the same ESSID and 
channel otherwise they won't be a mesh (there is also an option to 
 "mesh with any ESSID" but this makes for a major security hole so best 
avoided unless absolutely essential!) 
- mesh nodes do several simultaneous jobs: they provide their own 
internet backhaul, they connect clients wirelessly just like any AP does and 
they can also act as broadband firewalls for wired LANs.. all clever stuff :) 
- if you had several mesh network in the same area then your clients 
could be added to the same wiana realm and thus be able to connect to 
the different mesh clouds, otherwise the typical config is one mesh with 
the same ESSID and channel for all nodes and clients. 
QUES: 
> I've got a problem with a node which has an 18db panel 
> pointing at a town with a couple of 8db omni nodes at the 
> center. The remote 18db panel node won't mesh reliably 
> with the others dispite a reasonable signal level from 
> it in town. 
> It had been running slightly poorly with a 20db back-fire 
> antenna (one day down in every seven-or-so) - and since I 
> wasn't sure about that antenna I replaced it for the 18db 
> panel as it was more of a known entity and the signal did 
> improve by about 10%. But then the meshing got very much 
> worse. It will now mesh & report itself into wiana once 
> in every 48+ hours. 
> When I run dmesg on the ones in town I get (a lot of) this: 
> PACKET_OUT: Couldn't find a route to: 1.96.111.252, sending out a RREQ ! 
> 1.96.111.252 = remote 18db panel node 
> I can't get to the remote one easily, it's way up on a 
> hill side, and the antenna is even trickier being on a dodgy 
> slate roof so I'd really like a few ideas of what to try 
> once I'm there. 
> All node are running LocustWorld Mesh: v10 b25.1256 Linux 2.4.20 
> - I haven't dared do an update yet as I have users on pretty much 
> 24hrs a day! 
> Also a simple aside question while I'm here... do all nodes need 
> to run on the same channel and if so what about the clients - 
> can they run on different channels aswell/ instead?