[Babel-users] Some thoughts about Babel (feature requests)

[Mitar]

Hi!

I met today with Kostko and we discussed Babel a bit. We have few
feature requests which would really improve how we are using Babel in
wlan slovenija network.

So, on VPN servers we create tunnels to each node. This means, that to
make it work with Babel, we have then to put all tunnels into one
bridge and configure Babel to use that bridge. This complicates our
server configuration a lot and adds one extra moving part in between
which we do not like.

The reason why we have to do this is because:

- Babel does not support runtime configuration reload (that we could
add dynamically a new network interface)
- the best would be if configuration would have an "include directory" operation
- so we could just add another file for new interface
- and send HUP
- alternatively, there could be some IPC interface where we could call
into Babel (Kostko prefers, but I do not like it because then
configuration on disk differs from the one running)

This would much simplify our current setup.

Additionally, we worry that Babel does not handle many interfaces
well, that is, in a performant manner. Especially observing that Babel
used to use linear searching in lists for other things. So we have an
interface for every node, which means that this can grow into
thousands. Will Babel handle that well?


Mitar

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