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
• 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

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.

On the more business side of things we’re at EDcon in Toronto this week watching Vitalik dance and meeting up with the local Toronto Mesh group TOmesh.