Mhz900Mesh

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Bandwidth testing
Thanks for that, but I must be missing something as its querying my SCP command! What I really need to do is start testing things nearer the top limit of radio's (6 meg) as that is what I am now trying to deliver from our gateways. Trouble is we are physically a very long way away for testing inside the mesh as I sit on the gateway many miles away. We have just strengthened up our gateway links to about S/N 30dB but the speed is no better than before using our primative tools! Leechtest is yielding lower results at the gateway(about 1 meg) than at the first hop; tops out at about 2-3 meg depending on time of day! While using the locustworld mirror which is very reliable (outside of the evening rushhour) yields a very consistant 6 to 7 meg at the gateway site.

Basically, I have no idea if i am succeeding, where my next bottle neck, and how to overcome it. I had intended to use Guy's idea of a flat mesh, bridge out all the first hops with 'g' bridges and combine 'g' onto the same antenna using Joel's idea(different channels!). So far I have discovered that there is a bit of a hit from using a splitter, turned upside down, of about 2-3 dB which is a lot with our long links. I am also trialling Atheros cards, they work fine as an AP but no meshing, which means you need to cluster using pro like kenny is rolling out with his upgrade. I am tempted, like him, to use High power atheros C band in mikrotik's for backhaul. I really miss pqtest which seemed a pretty fair test Guess i will have to get in the car and drive round to each node with a laptop!

>>It would be great to have a CLI that downloaded a file between >>boxes. >   >as a starter for 10 :- >   >scp root@1.x.y.z:/bin/bash /drv2/lost+found >   >will copy the 500k bash file and time it, which is OK for testing >slow links. I couldn't get it to go to /dev/null and you have to put >a password in each time, but its a start for you to improve upon :-)   >    >you could put a bigger file on each box if the module has space, or    >there may be one there already - I didn't spend much time looking.

The simplest system we found is using a server connected to the gateway Mesh AP we originally used an old P11 and loaded a 20MB; 10MB and 2MB files which could then be downloaded from any client location We now use a rather meaty and expensive (but refurbed) G5 with a Mac Mini as back up the P11 is being used a client connect machine. You could also use http://www.mirror.ac.uk/mirror/live.locustworld.com/ or one of the other local Mirror sites to grab a file they have a pretty large pipe so throttling will be at your end and you have some data for comparison

>> It would be great to have a CLI that downloaded a file between boxes. > > as a starter for 10 :- > > scp root@1.x.y.z:/bin/bash /drv2/lost+found > > will copy the 500k bash file and time it, which is OK for testing slow > links. I couldn't get it to go to /dev/null and you have to put a > password in each time, but its a start for you to improve upon :-) > > you could put a bigger file on each box if the module has space, or > there may be one there already - I didn't spend much time looking.

What are your burst settings? Could you post a copy of all your settings? We are using 2Mbps feeds (only 256kbps up), and these are our current traffic and client shaping figures. Virtually all client traffic is "member". One change we made that seemed to improve general user experience was to knock "member up" basic speed down to 128 - it had been the same as the burst speed, possibly from defaults though I'm not sure about that.

Traffic Shaping enable shaping: Yes   No optimize traffic: Yes    No eth bandwidth: wlan0 bandwidth mbits: mesh down: mesh up: mesh down burst: mesh up burst: routing down: routing up: routing down burst: routing up burst: Gateway max per node: Gateway optimization priority: Gateway compress traffic: Gateway NAT workarounds: Client Shaping

unknown down: unknown up: unknown down burst: unknown up burst: public down: public up: public down burst: public up burst: member down: member up: member down burst: member up burst: owner down: owner up: owner down burst: owner up burst:

Richard Bowers Rural-WEB, England.

Alex Jonceski wrote: > I am convinced that the client traffic shaping is failing. I had resent 5-6 customers installation sites where it failed to shape. They were all assigned 256kbps member user class. The bandwidth test using www.testmy.net showed 700 to 800 kbps download speed. The only class I have set to this speed is VPN (unknown ). I am thinking is it possible the member class to be switched over to VPN? I am going to reshaped the VPN from 786/128 to 128/64. I have no user using VPN class. I just performed bandwidth test and AGAIN got download speed of 705kbps > I am connected as client to GW node with member user 256kbps. The GW node is bonded to 1.5Mbps ADSL line. > > Does anybody experienced this? > > ALEX > >  Bandwidth test using  www.testmy.net : (USER IS ASSIGNED MEMBER CLASS OF 256kpps) > 705 Kbps or 0.71 Mbps (86 kB/s) > >  0               500                  1000             1500             2000             2500             3000             3500             4000   Kbps > ::You:: > avg 243.95 (383 Kbps) > Typical Cable (256 - 4000) > Typical DSL (256 - 1500) > Satellite (50 - 1500) > ISDN (64 - 128) > Dial Up (28.8 -

>    I'm slow on this, but I thought I'd respond. > >    I recently upgraded one of our gateways to bonded T1's. I consulted with Jon about what should be the best settings and he said that the default speeds should work fine. I'm also on Pro 2137. I slightly modified the burst speeds and dropped the standard speeds. For the most part, Jon was right, the network is working fine most of the time with those settings. > >    Under heavy load, network traffic does fine on port 80, so regular downloads from a website and things like Microsoft's Patch Tuesday do not slam the network. It's the peer-2-peer traffic that is killing me. I've got a lot of people playing World of Warcraft - I see this from my traffic reports. It also shows me that Blizzard uses Bittorrent to distribute their weekly patches and I've seen this literally shut down parts of the network. What happens is that Bittorrent causes lots of small packets to be sent and received. The stations doing it tie up so much "airtime", they cause a denial of service on other users and other nodes. > >    What I've seen is when we had one T1, at peak load we could push about 600megs per hour into the mesh. I was hoping to see as much as 1.2Gigs of data go out once we upgraded the backhaul, but the most we've pushed out was somewhere around 900megs to 1Gig in an hour's time. I blame that on p2p for the most part, but it's caused me to look at my network and figure out what links need to be upgraded to allow more data to be pushed out. I know we could block p2p, but I have issues with doing that and prefer to leave the network wide open. > >    Therefore, in order to push out more data, I'm currently moving the core backhaul links to 5.8GHz. I'm going to use full-duplex Mikrotik radios and have them clustered into the mesh so that they are actually used as mesh links (you can do this too with Pro 2137). I'm also staggering frequencies on towers under heavy load (ch 1, 6, 11) and using dual-radio boxes where possible. > >    I'm also preparing some 900MHz meshboxes using the 900MHz Atheros cards from Ubuquiti Networks and I hope to move in-town network links to a 900MHz backbone and eliminate the number of hops in some parts of the network. > >    I plan to post a blog entry about all of this and update it as we progress. I'll post the link to the entry here.

>        We have went to a 3mb connection of two T1's but we have been having an issue with the bandwidth settings and wondered if any one else has seen this. We have had several customer when they download a file over 100mb or greater it just brings the network to a slow pace at first I though this was a virus but after looking into the problem we traced the problem to customers with downloading 100 to 200mb files as soon as they are done the speed comes back but we are told that all our customers are set to 384k both up and down and 512k both up and down in wiana and not sure where to go from here seeing if anyone else has had this problem we are running the pro version 2137 if it matters but we have seen this before on other verisons any help would be appricated.

zolcox cards
Does the 101 build also work on the PC Engines mb as the 100 build does? I've updated the atheros chipset drivers to the latest ones from the madwifi project and these now seem to be much more stable than before. This means the meshAP can now support atheros based 802.11a and 802.11g. Tests in the lab with 802.11a have yielded throughput results in the range of approximately 20 megabits of real throughput. So in that test, typically 3x the speed you would get with 802.11b. This test is only at a very short range and so is really just a driver throughput test rather than a real-world bandwidth test. In order to mesh with atheros you'll need to use ad-hoc mode and so it is recommended in that configuration to have another local radio in infrastructure mode or access point plugged into the ethernet port of your repeater nodes for local infrastructure mode client access. I will continue to keep an eye on the atheros drivers for any improvements/developments that would make infrastructure mode meshing possible.

To try out the latest release simply login to your meshbox and issue the command: getandverify tobuild25dev101

>Is the bug that prevents PPTP VPN to the outside world fixed in this release? I'd be surprised, as it isn't really a bug, but a missing feature. PPTP passthrough requires GRE protocol handling to be implemented in a particular way to get it to work with NatMesh. This is why you find NatMesh routers referring specifically to VPN passthrough being a feature. To get it to work in the Pro version required a reimplementation of the NAT support. I would be surprised if this was brought in with a point release. I would expect it to come in with the next major build.

Today i set up two meshAP pro boxes with atheros cards, both function as AP's but do not mesh. However, we have experimented just a little with atheros cards and can report some success. You will appreciate there is no meshing yet with these cards therefore you have to do the meshing on the wired side via clustering, which requires pro software as I understand it. Seems to defeat the object of one integrated solution, as you need to use something like a Mikrotik WDS network to form your backbone, which means a second network to administer. We face this dilemma in trying to deliver 8 meg broadband.

This may not be important to you if you have no repeaters, but absolutely vital to us, as all our boxes have to mesh leaving us with the problem of what to do for wireless backhaul. Anyway I have tried some generic atheros cards with the AR5212 chipset works as an AP in our compaq boxes. There are no radio stats or signal level recording and be careful with changing the radio settings in wiana or your box can crash.

Sorry that is the limit of our experience! The ubiquiti cards are widely used in the states and we have had success with The ZYCOM XG622 I am told that the Wistron CM9 cards work from solwise. For minipPCI to PCI adapters we use Solwise as they come with a pigtail for minPCI cards

This is the card we have had most succes with http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Mini-PCI-Card-Atheros-High-Power-802-11b-g-g-108Mb-s_W0QQitemZ9734757327QQcategoryZ45000QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem which together with a solwise adapter meets your cost requirement.

>I am back to my old problem of sourcing decent reliable MeshAP compatible >wireless cards. We make virtually all our boxes using old compaq boxes and >try and supply with omni and cables for £150 or less. This means sourcing >very reasonable priced reliable wireless pci cards! We did recently get a   >batch of the discontinued Netgear MA311... but that source is now exhausted. >We need to build a few new nodes a week at the moment so we need to know >which ones work! I keep buying and trying various atheros based cards which >I cant seem to get working! Can anyone suggest a reasonable priced pci card >that does actually work in the £20-£25 bracket! We cant justify the £35-£45 >tag put on the so called compatable cards! Most of our boxes need 2 cards!!