Gluon 2014.4

Added (and removed) hardware support

  • Buffalo
    • WZR-HP-AG300H / WZR-600DHP
    • WZR-HP-G450H
  • D-Link
    • DIR-615 (E1) support had to be dropped
  • TP-LINK
    • CPE210/220/510/520 (v1)
    • TL-MR3040 (v2
    • TL-WA750RE (v1)
    • TL-WA801N/ND (v2)
    • TL-WA850RE (v1)
    • TL-WR703N (v1)
    • TL-WR710N (v1)
    • TL-WR1043N/ND (v2)

New features

OpenWrt Barrier Breaker

Switching to the new OpenWrt release 14.09 (“Barrier Breaker”) has yielded lots of updates for both the kernel and most packages. Besides better performance, this has also greatly improved stability (far less out-of-memory issues!).

Modular config mode

The old gluon-config-mode package has been split into five small packages, each providing a single section of the config mode form. This simplifies removing or replacing parts of the wizard.

See the Site changes section for details.

Experimental support for batman-adv compat 15

As batman-adv has broken compatibility starting with batman-adv 2014.0 (bumping the “compat level” to 15), Gluon users must decide which batman-adv version to use. The package for the old batman-adv version gluon-mesh-batman-adv has been renamed to gluon-mesh-batman-adv-14, the new version can be used with gluon-mesh-batman-adv-15.

Please note that batman-adv compat 15 still isn’t tested very well (and there are known bugs in the current release 2014.3), so for now we still recommend using compat 14 in “production” environments.

fastd v16

Besides other new features and bugfixes, fastd v16 support the new authentication method “UMAC”. We recommend switching from the old salsa2012+gmac and null+salsa2012+gmac methods to the new salsa2012+umac and null+salsa2012+umac as UMAC is much faster and even more secure than GMAC.

Private WLAN

The new package gluon-luci-private-wifi allows to configure a private WLAN with WPA-PSK in the expert mode which is bridged with the WAN uplink.

Embedding SSH keys

Using gluon-authorized-keys it is possible to embed predefined SSH public keys to firmware images. If gluon-config-mode-* is left out images will be ready to mesh after the first boot with SSH running for further configuration.

Status page resolves nodenames

The tools gluon-announced and gluon-neighbour-info are now available. Using them enables the status page to resolve hostnames and IPs of a nodes’ neighbours.

This will also work on devices with multiple wireless interfaces.

Bugfixes

  • Expert Mode: Fixed all SSH keys being removed when a password was set
  • gluon-mesh-vpn-fastd: Fixed VPN peers removed from the site.conf not being removed from /etc/config/fastd
  • TL-LINK TL-WDR3600/4300: Added workaround for reboot issues
  • Improved stability (due to switch to OpenWrt Barrier Breaker)

Site changes

  • site.mk
    • Obsolete packages:
      • gluon-config-mode
      • gluon-mesh-batman-adv
    • Recommended new packages:
      • gluon-config-mode-autoupdater
      • gluon-config-mode-hostname
      • gluon-config-mode-mesh-vpn
      • gluon-config-mode-geo-location
      • gluon-config-mode-contact-info
      • gluon-mesh-batman-adv-14 (specify this before all other packages in the site.mk!)

Internals

The switch to Barrier Breaker has led to a multitude of changes all over Gluon:

  • The config mode/setup mode is now started by an own set of init scripts in /lib/gluon/setup-mode/rc.d run by procd
  • Many tools and services used by Gluon have been replaced by our own implementations to reduce the size of the images:
    • ethtool has been replaced by our minimal Lua library lua-ethtool-stats
    • tc has been replaced by our minimal implementation gluon-simple-tc
    • radvd has been replaced by our minimal implementation gluon-radvd

Known Issues

Alfred crashes

https://github.com/freifunk-gluon/gluon/issues/177

Alfred may still crash unconditionally. Some measures have been taken to aid but the core problem hasn’t been analyzed yet.

Out of memory / batman-adv memory leaks

https://github.com/freifunk-gluon/gluon/issues/216

In some (hopefully rare!) cases batman-adv may still leak memory associated with global TT entries. This may result in kernel panics or out-of-memory conditions.

Ignored tx-power offset on Ubiquiti AirMax devices

https://github.com/freifunk-gluon/gluon/issues/94

There is still no OpenWRT support for determining the transmission power offsets on Ubiquiti AirMax devices (Bullet M2, Picostation M2, Nanostation (loco) M2, …). Use Gluon with caution on these devices! Manual adjustment may be required.