meshdesk file

• The meshdesk configuration file follows the UCI conventions that are standard for OpenWrt.
• It has a couple of named sections.
• The only two sections you will typically tweak is internet and settings.

• This section is used to activate or deactivate the central control of the hardware.
• The FQDN and IP address of the RADIUSdesk server and the URLs for certain actions are specified here.

• This section is the only section which is unique according to the hardware.
• It will list the hardware id and the LEDs as well as the interface used for identity.
• It also includes other settings which tweak the behavior of the device when it is centrally managed.

• MESHdesk use the LEDs of the device on which it is installed to display information about the environment.
  • During startup a LED indicates the method used to retrieve the settings from the controller.
  • After startup when the device is used in a mesh network, this LED indicates how many neighboring nodes it sees.
  • A second LED indicates whether the device is in proper contact with the controller. (The LED can be either ON or OFF in such a case)
  • Finally, for mesh networks, we can also specify a third LED that indicates the mesh traffic flowing through a node.

• Let us take a look at the Xiaomi 4A 100M as an example.

#change directory to where the LEDs are
cd /sys/class/leds/
ls 
#These are the LEDs available
blue:power    mt76-phy0     mt76-phy1     yellow:power
#turn it off
echo "0" > yellow\:power/brightness
#turn it on
echo "1" > yellow\:power/brightness
#turn it off
echo "0" > blue\:power/brightness
#turn it on
echo "1" > blue\:power/brightness

• We can use the blue LED to signal during startup and neighbour counting (morse_led).
• We can also use the yellow LED to signal that communication with the controller is interrupted (internet_led).
• However, since there is no third LED, we will not define one for mesh traffic (wifi_led).

• As we said earlier, the settings section is the only section which is unique according to the hardware.
• We can thus modify the settings section as follows:

config settings 'settings'
    option hardware 'xiaomi_4a_100'
    option id_if 'eth0'
    option morse_led '/sys/class/leds/blue:power/brightness'
    option internet_led '/sys/class/leds/yellow:power/brightness'
    option internet_led_alarm '1'
    option wifi_led '/dev/null'
    option lan_up_file '/tmp/lan_up'

• hardware - must match the value of a hardware id in RADIUSdesk's Hardware applet.
• id_if - must match the interface specified in the wan_network file.
• internet_led_alarm - We set it to 1 to use it as an alarm (e.g. turn it on when the Internet is down).

• Later we will also use the value of xiaomi_4a_100 to define the hardware on the controller.

• The following table lists the most important points with comments

• Finally you need to adjust some items to match up with your controller and its environment.
• The following table lists some of the important items with comments

• We are almost finished. The last stop is to edit the captive_config.json file to customise it to our specific hardware.