Mesh Status Display

The Mesh Status page lists mesh nodes, link quality information, and the advertised services on the mesh network.


Mesh Status

Below the node name bar there are several controls.

Refresh

This button refreshes the Mesh Status display with current information.

Auto

This button sets the display to automatically refresh the node information every 10 seconds. To end auto-refresh mode, click Stop or Quit. Stop returns to the static Mesh Status display. Quit takes you back to the Node Status display, and clicking Mesh Status again from there will return you to auto-refresh mode on the Mesh Status display.

Quit

This button returns you to the Node Status display.

Mesh Status Display Sections

There are four sections on the Mesh Status display.

Local Hosts

This shows your mesh node along with any connected hosts and the advertised services available on your node and hosts. Typically you may click the service name to open a new browser tab containing the features of that service. This will be true for any available services in the Current Neighbors or Remote Nodes sections.

If you have any hosts for which you selected Do Not Propagate in the DHCP Reservations List, those hosts will be displayed in a light gray color only on that node’s Local Hosts column. If you created any DNS Aliases for your hosts, those aliases will be displayed in a light orange color only on that node’s Local Hosts column. All other hosts will be displayed in the default color for the theme that you are using.

Current Neighbors

This shows a list of Neighbor Nodes that are directly connected with your node (1 hop). These nodes may be connected via RF, DtD link using an Ethernet cable, or a tunnel over an Internet connection. There are several link quality statistics displayed for each connected node.

  • LQ or Link Quality is your node’s view of the percent of OLSR (Optimized Link State Routing protocol) packets received from the neighbor node. These packets exchange mesh routing and advertised services information, and they include a sequence number that is used to identify missing packets which is a measure of the quality of the link.

  • NLQ or Neighbor Link Quality is the neighbor node’s view of the percent of OLSR packets received from your node. This measures the quality of the link from the neighbor’s side.

  • TxMbps or Transmit Megabits per Second is a calculated estimate of the data rate achieved across the link with the neighbor node. This column may show zero if the data being transmitted between these nodes is not sufficient for the metric to be calculated.

  • Services is the column where any available services on the neighbor node will be displayed. You may click on the service link to navigate to the webpage for that service on the neighbor node.

In addition to the neighbor node name, there may be a text abbreviation in parentheses that tells how the neighbor node is connected.

  • (dtd) indicates a Device to Device connection using an Ethernet cable between the nodes. The neighbor may be listed twice if both an RF and DtD path exist.

  • (tun) indicates the path to the neighbor node is over an Internet tunnel. (tun*?) next to a mesh node in the Remote Nodes column indicates the node has tunnel links over the Internet to connect mesh islands together. ? is a number indicating the number of tunnel connections on that node.

  • (wan) indicates the node has been configured as a Mesh Gateway. Typically this is a gateway to the Internet, but it may also be to another isolated network.

Remote Nodes

This section lists other nodes on the network that are two or more hops away. Advertised services on nodes and their attached hosts are also listed. Remote Nodes are sorted by their ETX or Expected Transmission metric. ETX is a calculated estimate of the number of OLSR packets that must be sent in order to receive a round trip acknowledgement, and it is often referred to as “link cost”. When sending data the OLSR protocol selects the least cost route based on the lowest ETX path in the direction of the final destination.

Previous Nodes

This section lists any nodes which were recently connected to your node but are not currently connected. It shows the node name or IP address, as well as how long it has been since a node was actively connected to your node.

Link: AREDN Webpage