[lime-users] Fwd: [Battlemesh] No results again

Hi everyone, I'm sorry to disappoint who's following this list and who was waiting for results, but this year we have none. We tried very hard, but a series of mistakes and technical issues delayed the tests until it was too late. I understand what we are doing is hard, but I really do not buy nor endorse the argument that we did not have enough people involved or is just too hard, because we had several people participating and 3-5 people constantly working on the testbed. I remember especially Guido Ibarren and Alessandro Gnagni working tirelessly. We have to realize and accept we have failed for precise reasons, the approach we used is not effective. Please do not get aggressive or hyper-defensive. Having worked on the testbed actively, I also failed, so I also assume responsibility for failure. To sum up, I attribute the failure mostly to these reasons: * slow iteration: for every iteration we had to wait wibed nodes to be ready, but every time there was a different problem to debug because nodes were not becoming ready * lack of communication; I tried hard doing daily briefings and FAILED miserably; it just won't happen if we don't schedule them in advance and enforce them by taking the microphone and asking all the poeple involved to stop doing what they are doing and go there to report what problem they have and how other people can help * configuration mess: complex configuration, too many changes I really love the battlemesh: there has never been another event I attended 5 years in a row. I love it also because of the test battle. Without this peculiar feature the event would be just another conference and I'm not sure I would be willing to come every frigging year: there are so many conferences I want to attend but I can't got to all of them, I have to choose and I allocate a slot to the battlemesh every year because its unique mixture of technical talks and live hacking. Therefore I don't want to give up the battle and I don't think getting results is a mission impossible. That's why at the next battlemesh I want to try a different approach. After having worked with wibed I can say without doubts that I'm not interested in fixing it. At work I manage thousands of OpenWRT devices every day without any issue, configurations get updates in minutes. I think other solutions to accomplish the same tasks exist, are simpler to use, better maintained and more effective. I also think we should not hold a monopoly on the testbed, especially if the current approach has failed more than once. There are about a hundred people coming to the battlemesh, I firmly believe we can afford having 2 to (max) 3 testbeds taken care by different groups of people who can then run the tests they are most interested in. Last year (battlemesh v8 in Slovenia) the failure of the wibed testbed was attributed to me and other people who worked on a manually run testbed which according to them split the workforce. This year we all worked on a single testbed, including all the routing protocol developers that were present, and it didn't work. Next year please do not attack or blame those who want to try a different approach. I'm really looking forward to the next battlemesh and I hope we'll all be reasonable people, find solutions, compare approaches and use the most effective ones that allows us to get results.