[Babel-users] Openwrt support for later versions of babeld

[Dave Täht]

First post! Hi, all.

I have been prototyping a new community wireless network down in
Nicaragua. The terrain is hilly and well suited for meshy solutions...

So, anyway, I had just got olsr working on both dd-wrt and openwrt and
was a little dissatisfied with the results - when I read about
babel.

The RFC looks very good, as did the paper describing the performance
tests, and I especially liked babel's size in memory - on my ubquity
power station 2s the (old) binary is 1.6MB in size (compared to 6MB+ for
olsr, admittedly with the web interface turned on). I also very
much want to manage this network via ipv6, so babel is a big win there,
too, as olsr requires I run two daemons to do both protocols.

So I'm considering converting my existing prototypes over to babel
and ahcp to see what happens.

I've read all about babel that I could find and a few months back on
this mailing list, and haven't found the answers to:

Open questions

1) Is anyone maintaining an openwrt repository that implements later
versions of babeld and AHCP? The version of babel in the current (RC2)
release candidate for openwrt is ancient and doesn't interoperate with
the current release. (I think. It gives an error about the versioning of
the packet) The other pre-built version out there on the web is
back at .91.

I'm willing to build openwrt from scratch (and I think I have to,
because most of my existing routers only have 4MB of flash and things
like dnsmasq and udhcp can go in this configuration)

... but I do find the prospect somewhat scary. I have a server
co-located with isc that I could host it on if anyone was interested.

Given that I can't easily run current babel right now (will it work with
a 2.4.37 kernel?) My experiments are limited so far. 

I'm cloning the openwrt repo right now, tho....

2) I saw patches for tcpdump. Is anyone working on a dissector for
wireshark?

3) Is radvd still necessary in a babel/ahcp environment?

4) What radios are people using with babel? I've been looking over
ubquity's new routers and thinking I would use those (8MB flash, 32MB
ram, MIMO) in the future, but I'm certainly open to more hackable designs...

5) I do love the web interface to olsr. I can imagine something similar
could be built for babel... But I don't really see the point of http
existing inside the daemon....

6) Is there a AHCP hook to hook into name service updates? Autoconfiguration
is well and good but nsupdat-ing dns names is better...

7) What happens in the case of IPv4 multicast (for example, squid ICP
multicast)? 

Thanks for any help in advance. I will continue my reading and compiling....

-- 
Dave Taht http://the-edge.blogspot.com