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travelmate, a wlan connection manager for travel router

Description

If you’re planning an upcoming vacation or a business trip, taking your laptop, tablet or smartphone give you the ability to connect with friends or complete work on the go. But many hotels don’t have a secure wireless network setup or you’re limited on using a single device at once. Investing in a portable, mini travel router is a great way to connect all of your devices at once while having total control over your own personalized wireless network.
A logical combination of AP+STA mode on one physical radio allows most of OpenWrt/LEDE supported router devices to connect to a wireless hotspot/station (STA) and provide a wireless access point (AP) from that hotspot at the same time. Downside of this solution: whenever the STA interface looses the connection it will go into an active scan cycle which renders the radio unusable for AP mode operation, therefore the AP is taken down if the STA looses its association.
To avoid these kind of deadlocks, travelmate set all station interfaces in an "always off" mode, connects automatically to available hotspots and monitor & change these uplink connections automatically if required.

Main Features

STA interfaces operating in an "always off" mode, to make sure that the AP is always accessible
fast uplink connections
reliable connection tracking
easy setup within normal OpenWrt/LEDE environment
status & debug logging to syslog
procd init system support

Prerequisites

OpenWrt or LEDE trunk
iw (default) or iwinfo for wlan scanning

OpenWrt / LEDE trunk Installation & Usage

download the package here
install 'travelmate' (opkg install travelmate)
configure your network to support (multiple) wlan uplinks and set travelmate config options (details see below)
set 'trm_enabled' option in travelmate config to '1'
travelmate starts automatically during boot, triggered by procd as soon as the wireless subsystem is up & running

LuCI travelmate companion package

download the package here
install 'luci-app-travelmate' (opkg install luci-app-travelmate)
the application is located in LuCI under 'Services' menu
Thanks to Hannu Nyman for this great LuCI frontend!

Chaos Calmer installation notes

'travelmate' and 'luci-app-travelmate' are not available as ipk packages in the Chaos Calmer download repository
download the packages from a development snapshot directory (see download links above)
manually transfer the packages to your routers temp directory (with tools like sshfs or winscp)
install the packages as described above

Travelmate config options

mandatory config options:
- trm_enabled => main switch to enable/disable the travelmate service (default: '0', disabled)
- trm_loop => loop timeout in seconds for wlan monitoring (default: '30')
- trm_maxretry => how many times should travelmate try to connect to a certain uplink, to disable this check at all set it to '0' (default: '3')
optional config options:
- trm_debug => enable/disable debug logging (default: '0', disabled)
- trm_device => limit travelmate to a dedicated radio, i.e 'radio0' (default: use all radios)
- trm_iw => set this option to '0' to use iwinfo for wlan scanning (default: '1', use iw)

Setup

1. configure a wwan interface in /etc/config/network:


[...]
config interface 'wwan'
        option proto 'dhcp'
[...]

2. add this interface to your firewall configuration in /etc/config/firewall:


[...]
config zone
        option name 'wan'
        option input 'REJECT'
        option output 'ACCEPT'
        option forward 'REJECT'
        option masq '1'
        option mtu_fix '1'
        option network 'wan wan6 wwan'
[...]

3. add required ap and wwan stations to your wireless configuration in etc/config/wireless:


[...]
config wifi-iface
        option device 'radio0'
        option network 'lan'
        option ifname 'wlan0'
        option mode 'ap'
        option ssid 'example_ap'
        option encryption 'psk2+ccmp'
        option key 'abc'
        option disabled '0'
[...]
config wifi-iface
        option device 'radio0'
        option network 'wwan'
        option mode 'sta'
        option ssid 'example_01'
        option ifname 'wwan01'
        option encryption 'psk2+ccmp'
        option key 'abc'
        option disabled '1'
config wifi-iface
        option device 'radio0'
        option network 'wwan'
        option mode 'sta'
        option ssid 'example_02'
        option ifname 'wwan02'
        option encryption 'psk2+ccmp'
        option key 'xyz'
        option disabled '1'
config wifi-iface
        option device 'radio0'
        option network 'wwan'
        option mode 'sta'
        option ssid 'example_03'
        option ifname 'wwan03'
        option encryption 'none'
        option disabled '1'
[...]

4. reload network configuration & start travelmate:


/etc/init.d/network reload
/etc/init.d/travelmate start

Common runtime outputs (visible via logread)

Success: Sun Oct 9 17:02:21 2016 user.notice root: travelmate-0.2.1[712] info : wlan interface "wwan06" connected to uplink "blackhole.nl"

Disabled service: Sun Oct 9 18:06:32 2016 user.notice root: travelmate-0.2.1[2379] info : travelmate is currently disabled, please set 'trm_enabled' to use this service

Misconfigured/broken uplink: Sun Oct 9 18:56:42 2016 user.notice root: travelmate-0.2.1[2435] info : uplink "blackhole.nl" disabled due to permanent connection failures

Uplink disappeared: Sun Oct 9 19:00:28 2016 user.notice root: travelmate-0.2.1[3876] info : uplink "Neffos C5L" get lost

Support

Please join the travelmate discussion in this forum thread or contact me by mail

Removal

stop the travelmate daemon with /etc/init.d/travelmate stop
optional: remove the travelmate package (opkg remove travelmate)

Have fun!
Dirk

6.2 KiB Raw Blame History