[Babel-users] a cautionary note on setting up new babel nodes

[Juliusz Chroboczek]

> ...to discover that I was offering the shortest path to the exit 
> nodes, and thus had bypassed the two existing ~50mbit links into lab 
> links that were located indoors and going through a thousand+ meters 
> of trees... that was barely doing a megabit with 800+ms of delay.

What was the issue?  No multicast loss on the link?  I find that difficult 
to believe.

> (channel diversity not working did not help either)

Not sure about that -- if computing the channel number fails, babeld will 
assume that the link interferes with all other links, so the misconfigured 
link should be disfavoured.

I'm sure you already know that, but until I get around to rewriting the 
channel determination code for recent "we don't break userspace" Linux, 
you can work around it with manual configuration:

     interface wlan42 channel 42

> After that experience, I decided that I would make the firmware for 
> unconfigured nodes export a 512 metric,

Good plan, although I'd make it 32000.  This way it'll be easy to spot an 
unconfigured node in BabelWeb.

Note that if you do that, you should apply it at the metric level, not at 
the

-- Juliusz