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

[Juliusz Chroboczek]

Hi Dave,

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

Do you have any photographs?

> 1) Is anyone maintaining an openwrt repository that implements later
> versions of babeld and AHCP?

Gabriel?  What's the OpenWRT situation?

> (will it work with a 2.4.37 kernel?)

Yes, it will, although I recommend 2.6.21 or later for any serious IPv6
work.

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

Not to my knowledge.  It should be easy.

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

No, ahcpd takes care of configuration.

> 4) What radios are people using with babel?

My current favourite are Foneras, but we've also had success with the
Asus WL-500GP and the stock WRT.  We're also using laptops, which is
more convenient for testing and monitoring.

> I've been looking over ubquity's new routers and thinking I would use
> those (8MB flash, 32MB ram, MIMO) in the future,

Careful here -- make sure that the wireless hardware supports ad-hoc mode.

> 5) I do love the web interface to olsr. I can imagine something similar
> could be built for babel...

As you justly note, the user-friendly interface does not belong in Babel
itself.  The idea is that Babel is able to communicate with an external
monitoring process over a TCP socket.  There's one monitor that has been
developed last year,

    http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/babel/BabelTool.png

There's no reason why the same interface couldn't be used by a web
interface.

To see what the raw, low-level interface is like, run babeld with "-g
33123" on the command line.  Then do

  telnet localhost 33123

and you should see a mention of every change to babeld's internal
tables.

> 6) Is there a AHCP hook to hook into name service updates?

No.

Note that AHCP normally uses stateless configuration for IPv6.  If you
have any good ideas, I'm listening.

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

There is no support for multicast in Babel.  I do not know what it would
take to get Babel to cooperate with something like PIM-SM.

> I will continue my reading and compiling....

Please let us know how it goes.

                                        Juliusz