The Meraki mesh node I got has been up for a week now and here are my thoughts. Well, first of all, It is pretty neat. 'nuff said. I had some questions that I posed to Ben Chambers of Meraki and here are the answers.
The first thing I wanted to know was why it beacons every 500ms instead of 100ms. Twice per second did not seem very much and considerably off the norm. Ben stated that, "As far as the beacon interval goes, the reason is basically that if you have a fairly high number of repeaters (say, 20) within range of each other, 10 beacons per second per node gets pretty excessive." This makes total sense to me.
The next question was whether there was a way to configure the node or at least monitor it. I was told that because it was a free node belonging to the Meraki "Free the Net" project I would not be able to configure it but I would be able to monitor it in a variety of ways:
1. I can see if it is up by associating with it and browsing to http://my.meraki.net/ where I would see a splash page. Click on each image to see a larger version of the image.

3. I can select another link on the advanced page that allows me to set a static IP and some other functions.







Very cool! I was curious how much control Meraki was going to give over individual nodes. Is your Meraki installed on an Internet connection they provided or your own? I'm trying to deploy my own Meraki network in the Dallas, TX area. http://www.dfwfreenet.org if you're interested.
ReplyDeleteMy Meraki is running on a firewalled segment of my own network. I already had a network connection so why not allow others to use it. I can always to bandwidth limiting if it gets too much.
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