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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