case studies
overview
This page presents selected case studies illustrating how Mandelbit supports companies building and maintaining complex networking products.
Each case focuses on a concrete technical problem, the approach taken to address it, and the outcome achieved in production environments.
They describe real engineering work, often involving low-level debugging, protocol analysis, upstream collaboration, and long-term maintenance considerations.
selected case studies
One agent, 120,000 mesh devices, and a few patches to the Linux kernel
How we joined the team behind the cloud agent on 120,000+ mesh devices, from 32 MB Open-Mesh routers to Wi-Fi 6, and extended the Linux kernel where it fell short.
When the alert can't be lost: a custom mesh protocol over LoRa
A European IoT provider needed battery-powered sensors at remote sites to reach a single cellular gateway. We designed the LoRa mesh protocol that gets their alerts through.
Tracing random Wi-Fi drops at the driver level
Clients connect, get an IP, and pass no traffic. No pattern, no logs, no way to reproduce it. How we found the cause in the ath9k driver and cut the complaints by 90%.
Designing and upstreaming ovpn
Mandelbit designed, prototyped and upstreamed ovpn, the Linux kernel module that accelerates the OpenVPN data plane. Merged into mainline with Linux 6.16. We now maintain it.
Hundreds of commits, zero forks
Since 2016 we’ve merged hundreds of commits into OpenVPN, from data channel offload to six headline features of OpenVPN 2.7, without keeping a single line in a fork.
From a workstation to traceable mesh firmware
A wireless mesh vendor couldn’t tell which code was running on its customers’ networks. We made its OpenWrt firmware builds traceable and reproducible, and cut its divergence from upstream.
ovpn lands in VyOS: kernel-space OpenVPN, no config rewrites
We brought OpenVPN 2.7 and the in-kernel ovpn module to VyOS as open-source work, migrating existing configurations so that upgrades keep working.