Althea Development Update #47: Alpha 2 Milestone
I’m proud to announce the alpha 2 milestone for Althea. In Alpha 1 firmware setup was too tightly integrated into the build process to provide golden master images.
Alpha 2 marks that milestone, from here on out nightly firmware releases will be available and when flashed they will auto configure with our test exit and provide internet to you and any other members of a local mesh.
From here on out it should be pretty straightforward for anyone to flash and play around with Althea. Nightly firmware images and flashing instructions are available on our firmware page.
What’s New
- Exit autoconfiguration
- User credential autogeneration
- Traffic watching and accounting (it will generate a bill/invoice, but won’t pay it)
- Peer discovery and negotiation of secure peer tunnels
- Usable nightly builds: available here
What’s Almost Ready (aka Alpha 3)
- Ready for full time use by the adventurous
- User interface extensions and improvement
- A real exit signup process
- Load statistics gathering and the requisite opt in/out button.
- Automated exit load balancing client side
- Package updates pushed daily (so you don’t have to reflash the nightly to keep up)
- Everything we think is working but will inevitably end up being actually broken in Alpha 2
Long story short, if you flash our nightly firmware builds right now you’ll get a working internet connection in a minute or so and be able to mesh with other parties and determine what each party should pay or be paid.
What’s missing for Alpha 3 is mostly user interface stuff, the UI is being served at 192.168.1.1/althea in Alpha 2 but isn’t actually hooked into the application.
We also need a real sign up process implemented in the user interface, right now our dev exit serves any Althea user and doesn’t gather country codes/emails and enforce some level of region locking. Which is required to keep Netflix and other streaming services from blocking us as a VPN rather than an ‘ISP’.
The short term plan is to get Alpha 3 out the door and then try and get as many users as possible online so that we can hash out bugs in parallel to the development of the real billing code. We won’t be actually charging people for service yet, but we will be watching carefully to make sure the accounting is accurate, so that we can deploy real payments with confidence when they are ready.
For a lot of people I expect Althea will be attractive simply as a whole home VPN solution that just to happens to make it very easy to hook up your neighbor.
