Remote Management Guide for Mesh Rider Radio

Introduction

The Mesh Rider Radio runs the Mesh Rider OS. It is a customized version of Openwrt with enhancements useful for applications requiring low-latency command-and-control transmission and high-throughput video - e.g. UAV and robotics.

The purpose of this guide is to aide a user in remotely configuring Mesh Rider Radio settings. There are three primary ways to configure the Mesh Rider Radio. All of these interfaces can be accessed either locally (over Ethernet/USB) or remotely (over the wireless link).

1. 1. The Web GUI
2. 2. SSH
3. 3. The JSON-RPC API

Each of these interfaces serves a different purpose. The Web GUI is designed for initial configuration. For example, when you first start using the device, during bench testing.

SSH access is enabled for advanced system configuration and status monitoring. It provides root access to the underlying Linux system and is a very powerful way to access the system. Typically, equipment manufacturers should not allow SSH access to the end users of the radios. SSH can be very fast when using multiplexing.

The JSON-RPC API is designed for integration into customer software. As with SSH access, it potentially provides complete access to the underlying Linux system, however access permissions can also be tailored to the equipment manufacturer’s requirements so that end-users cannot access the nuts and bolts of the radios system.

A summary of the differences between the command-line APIs is shown in Table 1.

Table 1: Comparison of Mesh Rider Radio APIs

End users will typically never use any of these APIs directly. In fact, they should not even have the password to access the radios. Instead, they use application software such as ground-control-station (GCS) software which uses the JSON-RPC API to talk to the radio and relay information to the user.

The Web GUI

The Web GUI can be accessed in any web browser at https://<IP ADDRESS> (port 443). Note that the web browser uses a self-signed certificate. This means that connection to the web browser is encrypted, but not authenticated. The first time you access the Mesh Rider Radio from a new browser, you will get an SSL certificate warning. It is okay to ignore the warning and proceed.

SSH

SSH or Secure Shell is a way to securely login to the Mesh Rider Radio. The easiest way to do so is to open up a command prompt (Windows) or terminal (Linux), and type

ssh root@<IP ADDRESS>

Where <IP ADDRESS> is the IP address of the Mesh Rider Radio. There are numerous configuration options that your SSH client supports, such as public key authentication, and quiet output and you are encouraged to research them.

Note that your SSH client keeps a list of known hosts, and after a firmware upgrade, you may need to remove the Mesh Rider Radio from the known hosts list. You can do so by running

ssh-keygen -R <IP ADDRESS>

Sending Remote Commands

You can remotely execute a command via SSH to obtain network information from the node. For example,

ssh root@<IP ADDRESS> "iw wlan0 info"
Interface wlan0
    ifindex 13
    wdev 0x7
    addr 00:30:1a:4e:86:46
    type mesh point
    wiphy 0
    channel 12 (915 MHz), width: 20 MHz, center1: 915 MHz
    txpower 32.00 dBm

Speeding up the Connection

If your SSH client supports Multiplexing (OpenSSH for example), then it is a good way to improve the connection speed. Multiplexing allows you to send multiple commands over a single SSH connection. Information about the setup can be found here:

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSSH/Cookbook/Multiplexing

As an example, modify your SSH config file (usually ~/.ssh/config) with the following settings

Host *
    IdentitiesOnly yes
    ControlPersist yes
    COntrolMaster auto
    ControlPath ~/.ssh/%r@%h:%p

Create the file if it doesn't exist.

The JSON-RPC API

The JSON-RPC API is preferred when integrating radio access into custom software. As the name suggest JSON-RPC allows for remote procedure calls (RPC) over JSON. It provides a way to interact with ubus services and methods using HTTP requests and JSON-formatted data. This makes it accessible to a wide range of clients, including web applications, scripts, and other tools.  For more information about using the JSON-RPC API visit our JSON-RPC API guide.