[Babel-users] Running Babel over tunnels [was: duplicating externals]

[Juliusz Chroboczek]

> I spent some time yesterday trying to make this work:
>
> A--.
> |   C
> B--'

[...]

> However, I could not get babel to talk AC or BC through a tunnel.

Did you read the section "A note about tunnels and VPNs" in the babeld
README?

If that's not it, is there anything useful in the log?

[...]

> where the link AB is a bridge (technically it's a bridge over a pair
> of Ubiquity Nanos which are not running babel),

Eek?  Why are you putting this in the way?

Bridging will confuse Babel, by making the distinction between
interfaces less clear, and breaking Babel's link quality estimation.
(Intuitively, the bridge is lying to Babel -- it's claiming two
interfaces are adjacent, or, worse, the same interface, although they
really aren't.)

Michael, it looks to me like you're gratuitiously complicating things.
Please make it work first, once you have a working setup you can
complicate things to your heart's content.

> Babel talks very well between AB over the nanos (which are
> transparent).

It's probably mis-estimating link quality.  What's the -USR1 log like?

> Back to using something like babel-pinger, I have a
> "kludge-upon-kludge" working at the moment.  I have a second pinger
> shell script that tries to ping an address from A through B to the
> internet, if B's internet connection is working, it deletes the
> default route from A to the internet directly and creates a default
> route via B.  If B's internet connection is down, the script recreates
> the default link for A to go direct to the internet.  Then I let babel
> propagate the routes.  So far it appears to work.
>
> For me, babel-pinger on this node is only creating a default route to
> itself so that babel will pick it up, but my pinger script creates a
> default route to an actual place (which then babel-pinger uses for
> it's pings).  At this point, I probably don't need babel-pinger at
> all.
>
> I'm not sure what the right way to do this would really be but at
> least I seem to have something working.
>
> Michael