Myself and another ham are working on setting up a mesh node between our house.  I have three routers: wrt54g x2 and wrt54gs x1.  All were working fine but suddenly they don't see each other.  1 box is connected to a computer with FreePBX/Asterisk Server, Node 2 is connected as a mesh gateway, and the last will just be connected to an IP Phone.  I can access each of them via localnode:8080 but they just don't see each other and they are currently in the safe room together.

Any ideas?

Assumption is that you are using the 1.1.x version of the firmware.

There is a current bug in this firmware with the secure feature added. The conditions for this defect (on both ubiquity and linksys) are:

1) a time window of 5 seconds when 2 nodes are in a handshake to authenticate with each other,  to confirm they both have the private 128-bit key (which is distributed with our image) and thus can allow the link.

2) If the handshake of #1 fails during this time, then all subsequent packets will be dropped and the node ignored. The handshake can fail due to:

2a) The clock on one of the nodes (via NTP or other) jumps more than 3 seconds (50/50 chance of failure).

2b) Lost packets on RF channel

Options available to workaround:

1) comment out the secure plugin in the config file hostUBN:/etc/config/olsrd hostLinkSys:/etc/config/olsrd.confi and reboot (but all nodes in your mesh must do this to connect)

2) upgrade to bleeding edge experimental images released on the download page (but some other changes to be aware of in these images and all nodes must do this in your mesh)

3) revert to 1.0.x images (no ubnt, 5Ghz, etc. and all nodes...)