Gluon 2015.1

Added hardware support

Gluon v2015.1 is the first release to officially support hardware that is not handled by the ar71xx-generic OpenWrt target. This also means that ar71xx-generic isn’t the default target anymore, the GLUON_TARGET variable must be set for all runs of make and make clean now.

ar71xx-generic

  • Allnet

    • ALL0315N

  • D-Link

    • DIR-615 (C1)

  • GL.iNet

    • 6408A (v1)

    • 6416A (v1)

    • WRT160NL

  • Netgear

    • WNDR3700 (v1, v2)

    • WNDR3800

    • WNDRMAC (v2)

  • TP-Link

    • TL-MR3220 (v2)

    • TL-WA701N/ND (v1)

    • TL-WA860RE (v1)

    • TL-WA901N/ND (v2, v3)

    • TL-WR743N/ND (v1, v2)

    • TL-WR941N/ND (v5)

    • TL-WR2543N/ND (v1)

  • Ubiquiti

    • Nanostation M XW

    • Loco M XW

    • UniFi AP Pro

ar71xx-nand

  • Netgear

    • WNDR3700 (v4)

    • WNDR4300 (v1)

mpc85xx-generic

  • TP-Link

    • TL-WDR4900 (v1)

x86-generic

  • x86-generic

  • x86-virtualbox

  • x86-vmware

x86-kvm_guest

  • x86-kvm

New features

Multilingual config mode

All config and expert mode modules contain both English and German texts now. The English locale should always be enabled in site.mk (as English is the fallback language), German can be enabled in addition using the GLUON_LANGS setting.

The language shown is automatically determined from the headers sent by the user’s browser.

Mesh-on-LAN

Gluon now supports meshing using a node’s LAN ports. It can be enabled by default in site.conf, and configured by the user using the gluon-luci-portconfig expert mode package.

Please note that nodes without the mesh-on-lan feature enabled must never be connected via their LAN ports.

Extended WLAN configuration

The new client_disabled and mesh_disabled keys in the wifi24 and wifi5 sections allow to disable the client and mesh networks by default, which may make sense for images for special installations.

The new package gluon-luci-wifi-config allows the user to change these settings; in addition, the WLAN adapters’ transmission power can be changed in this package.

fastd “performance mode”

The new package gluon-luci-mesh-vpn-fastd allows the user to switch between the security and performance VPN sections. In performance mode, the method null will be prepended to the method list.

The new option configurable in the fastd_mesh_vpn section of site.conf must be set to true so firmware upgrades don’t overwrite the method list completely (non-null methods will still be overwritten). Adding the gluon-luci-mesh-vpn-fastd package enforces this setting.

Altitude setting in gluon-config-mode-geo-location

The gluon-config-mode-geo-location config mode module now contains an optional altitude field.

gluon-announced rework

The gluon-announced package has been reworked to allow querying it from anywhere in the mesh. In contrast to gluon-alfred, it is based on a query-response model (the master multicasts a query, the nodes respond), while gluon-alfred uses periodic announcements.

For now, we recommend including both gluon-alfred and gluon-announced in Gluon-based firmwares, until gluon-announced is ready to replace gluon-alfred completely, and software like the ffmap backend has been adjusted accordingly.

Nested peer groups

Nested peer groups for the fastd-mesh-vpn-fastd package can now be configured in site.conf, each with its own peer limit. This allows to add additional constraints, for example to connect to 2 peers altogether, but only 1 peer in each data center.

Autoupdater manual branch override

When running the updater manually on the command line, the branch to use can now be overridden using the -b option.

Bugfixes

Accidental factory reset fix

Pressing a node’s reset button for more than 5 seconds would completely reset a node’s configuration under certain conditions.

WAN IPv6 issues

The WAN port would stop to respond to IPv6 packets sometimes, also breaking IPv6 VPN connectivity.

WDR4900 WAN MAC address

The MAC address on the WAN port of the WDR4900 was broken, making this device unusable for mesh-on-wan configurations.

Site changes

  • site.conf

    • hostname_prefix is now optional, and is concatenated directly with the generated node ID, in particular no hyphen is inserted anymore. If you want to keep the old behaviour, you have to append the hyphen to the hostname_prefix field of your site.conf.

    • mesh_vpn_fastd: The default peer group name backbone isn’t hardcoded anymore, any group name can be used. Instead, the fastd_mesh_vpn table must now contain an element groups, for example:

      fastd_mesh_vpn = {
  methods = {'salsa2012+umac'},
  mtu = 1426,
  groups = {
    backbone = {
      limit = 2,
      peers = {
        -- ...
      }
    }
  }
}

    • config_mode: The config mode messages aren’t configured in site.conf anymore. Instead, they are defined language-specific gettext files in the i18n subdirectory of the site configuration (see Config mode texts).

    • roles: The display strings for the node roles aren’t configured in the site.conf anymore, but in the site i18n files. The site.conf section becomes:

      roles = {
  default = 'foo',
  list = {
    'foo',
    'bar',
  }
}

      The display string use i18n message IDs like gluon-luci-node-role:role:foo and gluon-luci-node-role:role:bar.

  • site.mk

    • gluon-mesh-batman-adv-15 is now the recommended batman-adv version for new Gluon deployments.

    • The packages gluon-setup-mode and gluon-config-mode-core must now be added to GLUON_SITE_PACKAGES explicitly (to allow replacing them with community-specific implementations).

    • The new GLUON_LANGS variable selects the config mode languages to include. It defaults to en, setting it to en de will select both the English and German locales. en must always be included.

Internals

New upgrade script directory

The distinction between initial and invariant scripts has been removed, all scripts are now run on each upgrade. Instead of having one script directory per package, all upgrade scripts lie in /lib/gluon/upgrade now, so it is possible to define the run order across packages.

Merged package repository

The Gluon-specific packages have been moved to the package directory of the Gluon main repository. The packages repository now only contains packages that will be submitted to the OpenWrt upstream eventually.

Known Issues

Alfred/respondd crashes

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

Occasional alfred crashes may still occur. As this is caused by a kernel issue, we suspect that respondd, which gluon-announced is based on, is affected in the same way.

Ignored TX power offset on Ubiquiti AirMax devices

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

The default transmission power setting on many of these devices is too high. It may be necessary to make manual adjustments, for example using the gluon-luci-wifi-config package. The values shown by gluon-luci-wifi-config generally include the TX power offset (amplifier and antenna gain) where available, but on many devices the offset is inaccurate or unavailable.