[Babel-users] Babel Android & Maemo GUI

[Mitar]

Hi!

On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 1:56 PM, Juliusz Chroboczek
<Juliusz.Chroboczek at pps.jussieu.fr> wrote:
> Could you please clarify how you intend to work around the lack of root
> access on Android machines?  Oh, and does Android support ad-hoc mode
> for wifi interfaces?

Android does support ad-hoc once you change default WiFi configuration
a little bit. I think it has a drawback that scanning takes longer.
But there is a ticket for all this and also some progress:

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=82

It would be great if we could convince Google about importance of
ad-hoc mode on Android. I have send just a few days an e-mail to their
Chief Internet Evangelist, Vint Cerf:

http://wlan-lj.net/lists/arc/talk/2010-05/msg00022.html

So currently rooted phone will be a requirement. But this will be the
only one. Everything else (ad-hoc config changes, routing protocol
daemon running as root...) will be made by this GUI app. So we would
target those users who are hacking Android a little bit (and have
rooted phone) but they do not know our wireless networks already. So
they would be able to use them without going in all technical details.
And of course all of us who would be able to use the GUI for easier
access to our networks. I would also like to make it a diagnostic tool
when you are putting up a new node to check how it works and similar.
I would also like to have a real-time map of phone/node and drawn
links to its peers so that it is easier to see how links change when
you move around. And some graphs for how things have been changing
over the time. So much of this can be routing protocol independent
(but there will be some need to make a common way of retrieving
necessary information from underlying daemon).

Does Babel have a way or retrieving/monitoring state of whole mesh? In
OLSR every node have knowledge about whole mesh. How it is with Babel?

It would be maybe also interesting to get our routing daemons added to
official unofficial Android distributions (like
http://www.cyanogenmod.com/) which many are using.

> I'd additionally like to very strongly encourage you to consider
> interaction with ahcpd[1], which is routing-protocol agnostic -- it
> works with OLSR as it works with Babel as it would work with any other
> routing protoocol.

I didn't know that ahcpd is routing-protocol agnostic. This is great
because I had exactly this problem with our GUI. How to assign a
temporary IP to somebody using GUI app.

But this does not work in IPv4 only networks?


Mitar