[OpenWrt-Devel] Multiple OpenWrt devices collectively managed?

[David Lang]

On Tue, 24 Mar 2015, valent.turkovic at gmail.com wrote:

> After reading comments from all of you I thought of deploying
> additional devices just as wifi analyzers, as few of you suggested. I
> have used kismet before, but only as standalone wifi scanner, but
> there is also an option to deploy kismet-drones and monitor multiple
> endpoints from central kismet server.
>
> That could probably work if you can get alerts from kismet when some
> channel starts to have lots more traffic than it used to have and then
> take action if necessary to modify your node's channels. Any thoughts
> on this approach?

The devil is in the details. What does "too much traffic" mean? It could just be 
the crowd that you are intending to serve using the system, or one person doing 
a yum update.

Then there's the problem of deciding what to do. As I was trying to say in my 
last, long message, figuring out what channel each AP is on is not a science, 
it's part art because the system can't know everything (are these APs heavily 
loaded because this is the keynote and everyone's in one place, or because 
everyone is in the lobby waiting for the show floor to open in 10 min and will 
flood in to the area where the APs are idle, etc)

I've had cases where vendors on the show floor were demoing video streaming to 
mobile devices, using their own APs not coordinated with us (and after signing 
an agreement that they would not do so) where their activity not only clobbered 
three APs on the show floor, but 6 rooms of APs on the floor above. At some 
point there's not much you can actually do from a technical point of view other 
than identifying the problem.

Kismit and similar can be useful tools to gather facts, but turning facts into 
information and figuring out what actions you can take are far from simple.

David Lang
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