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.

Articles without pictures are boring

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’.