[Babel-users] [homenet] Detecting bridges

[Markus Stenberg]

On 18.12.2015, at 11.53, Juliusz Chroboczek <jch at pps.univ-paris-diderot.fr> wrote:
>> Is there room in the protocol for a router to announce what link type it
>> is on?
> This could be carried by a sub-TLV of Hello (or a sub-TLV of IHU if you
> want to make it per-host).
> 
>> I.e., a router on wifi announces wifi and when a router that is on wired
>> receives an announcement from a router on wifi it knows that there
>> a bridge somewhere.
> 
> Not a bad idea, but I'm a little hesitant to implement that, since it
> would require defining a taxonomy of interface types at the protocol
> level.  (Currently the taxonomy exists in the implementation, but it
> doesn’t appear in the protocol -- the protocol only knows about metrics.)

I am somewhat suspicious about the idea too, although for different reasons. Notably, most things that run routing protocol these days use ethernet plugs for them (+- some wireless ad-hoc people).

Even if I have ‘modern cheapo router’ on both ends of a powerline bridge, odds are, it is just using ethernet plug. So link type autodetection is out of the window, and if I manually need to specify that this ethernet is really powerline, I might as well configure the routing protocol, and I find both ideas non-appealing.

Cheers,

-Markus