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Project Byzantium: Zero To Ad-Hoc Mesh Network In 60 Seconds (Video)
Project Byzantium calls itself Ad-hoc wireless mesh networking for the zombie apocalypse. It's also potentially useful for less-thrilling emergencies, such as floods, earthquakes, and political uprisings (or getting everyone at the office their /. fix when the network goes down). The latest version debuted at the HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) conference in July, 2012. You can download your very own copy of Byzantium any time you like. Hopefully you will then burn a dozen or so CDs (it's compact enough that it doesn't need a DVD) for friends and neighbors, so that if you suddenly see zombies approaching and your regular ISP has already been overrun and isn't working, you can set up a wireless mesh network and coordinate your anti-zombie efforts. And you won't even need to use the command line. (slides and audio of their presentation)
Why not simply flip your WiFi port from 'infrastructure' to 'ad-hoc'?
Ken
Is that what we look like to "regular" people? That looks like the 3 Musketeers of Virginity
9dbi antenna and external wifi adapter FTW (the last I tested worked well upto a mile in the boonies)
Put the antenna higher up or use a directional one. Absorption by the environment is usually even worse than inverse square losses.
With clear line of sight and no Fresnel zone obstruction, a quarter mile should be completely possible. Look up the distance record, it's remarkable.
Great! You can still check out Doomsday Pie and find out that you aren't the only one fighting off zombies as everyone will be tweeting the Zombie Apocalypse in real time.
www.DIYTVAntennas.com
Your WiFi router has a legally-mandated limit on signal strength. Hopefully the FCC will be a little less zealous once the first zombies appear.
so if there is a natural disaster i'm not supposed to worry about finding food, medical help and anything else to survive but immediately start surfing the internet?
and even if i did do this, only the naive morons will start advertising that they have food and are willing to share.
Doesn't a directional antenna kind of defeat the idea of a mesh network? Or are we off topic now?
Your WiFi router has a legally-mandated limit on signal strength. Hopefully the FCC will be a little less zealous once the first zombies appear.
This reminds me of a guy I knew around Y2k. Moved all of his stuff off into a cabin in the woods (he wouldn't tell us where) in October of 1999. The thing I thought was hilarious is that he also got a Ham radio license around that time, so that he could use the radios after civilization fell. I know that your car will still start for people who don't have a driver's license; I assume ham radios work the same way...
With directional antennas and amplifiers, I've set up a stable 802.11b connection at 17 miles. I remember reading that Cisco had one going between mountaintops at 50 miles. All of this was 5 years ago, so things are probably more impressive today.
"Lame" - Galaxar
9dbi antenna and external wifi adapter FTW (the last I tested worked well upto a mile in the boonies)
You are assuming that my neighbors are in any way tech savvy? The guy closest to me was taken by surprise when the TV system went digital.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
Directional antennas are perfectly in line with the idea of a mesh network. The problems that mesh networks try to solve are topological. The single most important aspect of a mesh network is that it's self-organizing, which means you can add and remove links ad hoc and the network reconfigures itself to use the available links. Type and distance of individual links are secondary concerns. You can build a mesh network out of wired Ethernet links if you want to. The focus on wireless links is just a result of them being easier to create ad hoc than wired connections.
Is there a distribution of Tomato/DD-WRT/OpenWRT with this preinstalled?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
We're building a mesh network in Montreal, putting antennas on our roofs or windows. It's impressive what can be done with OpenWRT running babeld or babeld, and 100$ or less worth of hardware. Also a nice way to connect various free software hacking groups, and.. neighbours. http://wiki.reseaulibre.ca/
Check out also: http://freenetworkfoundation.org/
Vernor Vinge was my networking teacher at SDSU... He mentioned an idea in passing similar to this (around 1997ish), except that in his vision, the network would be explosively formed. Imagine that you could get these nodes down to the size of a quarter. maybe it had a solar cell + battery combo. You could fire off a missle or a shell over a field of battle, a low yield explosive would disperse these nodes over some area, and would automatically create a mesh network. I still think that the idea has merit, maybe somehow install Byzantium into a tiny embedded controllers, etc...
Obviously 802.11 doesn't scale in most non-urban environments (i.e. mountains or trees).
I've seen some references to some HAM's driving packet data up to 220Kbps in the early 90's. Anybody here familiar with how that worked? Most COTS HAM packet data seems to be stuck at 9600bps.
And, yes, I'm assuming the FCC has all been turned into zombies at that point.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Most wifi stations allow for more than 1 antenna.
We have started on this already. https://github.com/Byzantium/Byzantium/wiki/Setting-up-a-mesh-node-without-byzantium. We will have a lot more on this in the coming months. We're heading to an International Summit for Community Wireless Networks in early October to collaborate with other mesh projects and communities on some standard for interoperability. Also, the software we're using to build Byzantium will be packaged and submitted to the top Linux distros for inclusion in their repositories, but for now it's easier to develop and test on a closed platform.
I'm 2 blocks from my office which has DSL, but the house is in a different phone exchange and at the end of that run so no DSL available. I'm using open-mesh to get to my house. I go from an outdoor open-mesh on the office to non line of site outdoor unit out on a neighbor's barn. Then across a field to my house (I'm semi rural). I'm only getting around 3 meg of speed but it's better than the 22k modem option. This is with the default omni antenna on the open mesh gear. Nice equipment for less than 100 for an outdoor unit.
Of course if the zombies hit who's going to have power to be running these things?
We're still having some trouble supporting MacBooks, particularly because none of the core developers own one. We'd love to help you troubleshoot the issue, as we certainly don't want to exclude Macs from being nodes. Best way to reach us is through our mailing list or in #byzantium on Freenode.
Is it possible to include long-distance wireless links in the system/ Or more generally, can one add other links than WiFi?
Yes. The routing protocols we have chosen are layer-1/layer-2 agnostic. You can connect to other nodes through any physical link you have available. Dial up, satellite, HAM radio, a VPN tunnel, carrier pigeon, ...
Another benefit of electronic technology is collaboration and information storage. Byzantium seems great for that, at least for a local group. Depending on the situation, there may be a need for high security, to restrict access to certain documents/wikis, and authentication, to know who one is talking to. That would be impossible to provide to provide to the ignorant "iPhone users" they keep going on about. Impossible at least for the leaf nodes without the Byzantium software (e.g. ARP spoofing), and very difficult for the router nodes as well.
We believe that it can be done, that it can be done securely, and that it can be done securely for iPhone users. Obviously there will always be challenges and vulnerabilities in any system this complex, but we can make an effort to address those or at least make it easier for end users to exercise common sense. We're not there yet, but we think this is a step in the right direction.
How does this compare to existing ad-hoc WiFi mesh protocols such as B.A.T.M.A.N. / Open-Mesh, or some of the others listed at the bottom of the Wikipedia entry?
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.