Network Management, Monitoring, Planning, and Configuration tools for community networks

1

Hi everyone! I’ve been exploring tools used for community network management/planning/etc and wonder what folks are currently using. Right now, particularly for captive portal management, Ive found CoovaChilli to be the best but it has its issues.

Ideally, you could have a plug and play mechanism when a user could grab the components needed (captival portal, billing management, network monitoring). OpenWISP is doing some of this, I believe.

Also there is nothing I’ve see so far that provide a NetBox like management interface for community networks in addition to tools to support in the network planning phase, ip address management. Would love to hear about tools folks are using.

I’m playing around with idea for a more modular version of coova-chilli and a general management and planning solution. Would love thoughts on what the community thinks is missing and needed on the management and planning side.

Cheers!

1 Like
2

Hi Innocent,

Dirk van der Walt in South Africa created RadiusDesk and MeshDesk which can do both provisioning and captive portal. products [RADIUSdesk] It has been a while since I have looked at it though.

StartYourOwnISP has a list of resources although they are more oriented towards the North American WISP environment Billing and Customer Management - Start Your Own ISP

1 Like
3

Thanks Steve. I’ve played around a bit with RadiusDesk. How popular do you think it is with community networks in general? I found it highly functional but very cumbersome.

4

I haven’t been in touch with Dirk in a while. Most of his clients are commercial wireless ISPs, not sure if any CNs are using it. There is also Freeside http://freeside.biz/freeside which can do provisioning but I suspect that both Freeside and RadiusDesk are going to feel cumbersome compared to the offerings from WiFi manufacturers with the trade-off being vendor lock-in.

5

I know David Johnson uses RadiusDesk quite extensively and I believe they have an updated version working in a docker container. I’ll ping him and try to get a link.

6

Thanks, Eric. I remember chatting with David about this a while ago, but never asked if he was actively using it. I just tried running it locally and getting all sorts of errors. Would be interesting to survey CNs to understand what they are actually using and what needs they have. I know for sure that voucher/captive portals are a big part, but doesn’t seem like there is consensus on the best way to deploy those.

Also a question of at what point should we just use the commercial/proprietary solutions? Should we build the FOSS solutions in a way that CNs when they are ready can easily transition from the FOSS to the COTS solutions?

7

Hi all - good discussion going on here. I’ve used RadiuDesk for about 2 years now. I created a docker container version using the latest version available on sourceforge. Its worked well for creating vouchers for the Ocean View community network and combining with pfsense to authenticate and accounting. The user interface takes some time to get used to. I’ve never used meshdesk - its partner mesh management system. The challenge for me is having so many tools to manage different things - e.g. Unifi WiFi management to manage the network, RadiusDesk for vouchers, pfsense for the firewall, Grafana for traffic monitoring. Would like to see one dashbaord that integrates everything one day.

1 Like
8

Reminder: Strategies and Tools for Community Network Monitoring, 27 October

Hello All,

Français ci-dessous

This is a friendly reminder to register to join the second session of the 2021/2022 Virtual Summit on Community Networks in Africa discussing Strategies and Tools for Community Network Monitoring on 27 October, 12:00 -13:30 UTC.

As community networks grow and scale their services there’s a need to ensure quality and reliability. Network monitoring is a key component of network management, by enabling operators to review network health and performance. It allows operators to see what happens on a network, providing real-time and historical information on the usage, performance, and status of every device, application, and all data.

This online event will explore strategies and tools for implementing network monitoring for community networks. It will showcase tested tools and approaches to effectively manage and monitor bandwidth usage, network health, and performance.

Register to join now: Strategies and Tools for Community Network Monitoring - Internet Society

Kind regards,

Bonjour à toutes et à tous,

Ceci est un petit rappel pour vous inscrire à la deuxième session du Sommet virtuel sur les réseaux communautaires en Afrique (édition 2021/2022) qui aura lieu le 27 octobre, de 12h00 à 13h30 UTC autour des stratégies et des outils nécessaires pour la surveillance des réseaux communautaires.

À mesure que les réseaux communautaires se développent et élargissent leurs services, il s’avère nécessaire d’en assurer la qualité et la fiabilité. Le suivi d’un réseau est un élément crucial de la gestion d’un réseau, car il permet aux opérateurs d’examiner la santé et les performances du réseau, en leur permettant de voir ce qui se passe sur un réseau, à travers des informations et historiques fournies en temps réel sur son utilisation, ses performances et le statut de chaque appareil, application et toutes les données.

Cet événement en ligne présentera donc les stratégies et les outils qui permettent la mise en œuvre de la surveillance duréseau pour les réseaux communautaires. Ainsi, la séance abordera la thématique d’outils et d’approches d’une efficacité prouvée pour la gestion et le suivi de l’utilisation de la bande passante, de la santé et des performances d’un réseau.

Inscrivez-vous dès maintenant pour y prendre part : https://www.internetsociety.org/fr/events/summit-community-networks-africa/2021-22/event-2/

Bien Cordialement,

9

Update from Dirk on RadiusDesk Free Speech And Free Beer To Connect The Unconnected

10

I see that OpenWisp appears to be thriving with quite an active developer community. Nice set of features for configuration management, deployment, and management of OpenWRT devices.

11

I’ve been in conversations with Federico Capoano from OpenWISP in another thread here:

12

openWISP is still just openWrt devices correct? And last I checked they don’t necessarily create the captive portal but utilize things like coovachilli. Is this still the case?

13

Mainly yes, although they have an experimental branch on managing hardware using AirOS: AirOS Backend — netjsonconfig 0.6.2 documentation

OpenWISP stands on top of other well stablished open source projects, like OpenWRT, Django, FreeRadius, InfluxDB, Ansible, Docker, to name a few.

I don´t recall what captive portal is the default one.

14

Picking up this thread, I was reminded of LibreQoS today. I have not used it but it seems like it might be particularly useful for those with limited upstream connectivity, especially in dealing with bufferbloat issues.

15

Yeah, its great. I was actually using it this summer with a WISP in Malawi. In very very early stages, but building an open integrations platform for all these applications (mostly done libreQos, nagios, splynx, quickbooks, and hopefully freeradius soon). Should have a working version in a couple weeks that I’ll post here!

4 Likes
16

Look forward to seeing it!