Specifics and history of a Freifunk network

This post is part of the series Building your own Software Defined Network with Linux and Open Source Tools and covers the specifics of a Freifunk network as well as the history for the Freifunk Hochstift network which led to the latest re-design.

From a birds eye perspective, the Freifunk Hochstift infrastructure mainly consists of three building blocks:

  1. Distributed servers hosted in data centers in Paderborn as remotely in Germany providing infrastructure services
  2. Wireless backbones within the city centers of Paderborn, Warburg, etc.
  3. Freifunk nodes at homes, shops, enterprises, or elsewhere

This post will focus on the distributed servers as well as the wireless backbones and will only cover the around 1.000 client nodes from the perspective of connecting them to the backbone (“gateways“).

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FFRL Routingdays – Learn to build the Internet

Over a year ago we (the Freifunk Rheinland Backbone Operators) organized the FFRL Routindays, a two day event where we gave a hands-on trainig on “How to build the Internet” or any internal network. As of periodic quesions about where to find the slides and videos here’s a summary of all media available of this event.

The event has entirely been in german language, as are all slides and lab guides. This is provided in the hope, that it still might be of some use even for non-german speakers.

The building blocks were

  1. Networking / IP basics
  2. Static routing + bird hands-on Lab
  3. OSPF
  4. eBGP
  5. eBGP -> OSPF redistribution
  6. iBGP
  7. Policy-based Routing

The complete slidedeck is available here. Thanks to the CCC VideoOperation Center, there are recordings of the event avilable on media.ccc.de, too.