Part 3: LoRes Node, connecting us to other local servers on LoRes Mesh

Opening P2Panda ports with Traefik

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +1000

Supporting P2Panda apps like lores-node requires a change to the default Co-op Cloud Traefik config.

You might recall that when we setup Accessing our Pi from the internet, we learned about how TCP and UDP both use ports, and we setup port forwarding on our router for the ports we need for web traffic, and also for UDP ports 2022 and 2023 for P2Panda.

Now that we’re installing lores-node, we need traffic to those ports to be accepted and routed by Traefik to the correct app. Even if you aren’t doing port forwarding on your router (perhaps because you’re just using your node on a local network), you still need to do this step.

Node steward accounts

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +1000

Each Node Steward of your node gets their own account on lores-node, to allow for collaboration and transparency.

However, in this initial setup, that’s probably just you. Let’s go through the process of setting up an account for you to administer the node.

Storing the admin credentials

Presuming that you’ve just installed lores-node with Co-op Cloud, you should now be able to visit it’s url in your browser, something like https://lores-node.YOUR_SERVER_DOMAIN, and you’ll see the following:

Joining a Region

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +1000

We’re only going to change the world if we work together. A Region in LoRes Mesh is made up of nodes, connected via peer-to-peer communication, working together as a digital commons.

Creating a region

For the purpose of these instructions, someone in our group has presumably created the Region already. You can take a look at the “Create New Region” tab to see what’s involved in this.

Given that someone has done this already, they can share the region ID with us, which is used to join. The region ID isn’t intended to be secure, but keeping it private could reduce unnecessary join requests. We suggest that groups don’t put it on their website or anything, but pass it on directly to people setting up new nodes.

Gossiping with peer Nodes

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +1000

LoRes Nodes need to be able to coordinate with each other over a range of technologies, some of them quite slow and intermittent, like radio transmissions. To do this, we don’t assume that the entire network is always connected, we pass messages on from node to node around the Region. This approach is called a gossip protocol.

Regional gossip

Each region has it’s own “topic”, within which the nodes pass on messages to each other until every node has every message (eventual consistency). To do this, a LoRes Node doesn’t need to connect to every other node in the region, just to some of them, as messages will be relayed.