Establishing a Mesh Portal

It's not entirely automatic quite yet; we'll get a more automatic solution in place soon.

Requirements

• A USB ethernet adapter
• One OLPC laptop (XO)
• The xo-mpp-server RPM here: xo-mpp-server-0.1-1.noarch.rpm
• (The srpm is here, but you don't need it to setup the MPP)

What to do

• Boot up your XO

• Switch to a virtual terminal (press Ctrl+Alt+F1), and log in as 'root'

• Turn off NetworkManager, dhcdbd (the DHCP D-Bus daemon), and avahi

chkconfig --level 2345 NetworkManager off
chkconfig --level 2345 dhcdbd off
chkconfig --level 2345 avahi-daemon off

• Set your init level to '3'; stopping Sugar and X from starting again.

nano /etc/inittab

find the line with:

id:5:initdefault:

and change the '5' to a '3' so it looks like this instead:

id:3:initdefault:

• Plug the USB ethernet adapter into the XO

• Reboot; type 'reboot' and press enter

• Wait for the XO to boot to the login prompt, then log in as 'root'

• Bring up the USB ethernet interface

ifup eth0

• Install the DHCP daemon

yum -y install dhcp

You may have to try this command twice; yum sometimes runs out of memory doing dependency solving, and terminates before actually installing the RPM. Keep trying until the last line says "completed!".

• Copy the xo-mpp-server RPM onto the XO and install it:

rpm -Uhv xo-mpp-server-0.1-1.noarch.rpm --force

• Turn on various services at startup

chkconfig --level 345 network on
chkconfig --level 345 iptables on
chkconfig --level 345 dhcpd on
chkconfig --level 345 mpp on

• Reboot; type 'reboot' and press enter

and it should all work

Further Reading

More information is available on these topics:

• Mesh Portal discovery protocol
• How things work in Trial1
• Cozybit's MPP Utils