Monitoring, not surveillance
This site exists so that stewards can see when a node needs attention. Every five minutes, each node answers a poll from its own network’s collector, and the collectors send summaries here. Nothing about what members do online is collected, because nothing about what members do online is needed to keep a radio on a roof.
What each node reports
- Whether it is up, and its firmware version.
- For each of its links: the neighboring node, the band, the signal strength and the negotiated link rate.
- The total bytes passed through the node, as a single counter, without any breakdown.
- For hubs and solar nodes: battery charge, power source and enclosure temperature.
What we never collect
- The contents of anyone’s traffic.
- Destinations, websites visited or DNS lookups.
- Usage by household. Nodes count bytes, not people.
- The hardware addresses of members’ phones, laptops or anything else.
- Hosts’ names or addresses. Nodes are located by grid square only.
How long we keep it
Raw five-minute polls are kept for thirty days, long enough to diagnose a fault. Daily summaries are kept for thirteen months, so that a network can compare this winter with the last. Anonymous, network-level totals are kept indefinitely for research, including papers such as Mesh at the Margins.
What this site shows
Everything on this site is public: node status, links, uptime, hardware and each network’s maintenance log. Stewards are listed by first name and initial. Schematics show approximate positions on a grid, not a map. If you are a host and would rather your node were not listed, tell your stewards and it will be shown without its site description.