[Babel-users] Open-Mesh migration, 802.11s, babeld, speed degradation

[Stuart Trusty]

Greetings all,

After being purchased by Datto, after closing their source and demanding
money every month to use their formerly GPL radios, Cloudtrax committed
some form of suicide, and corrupted all of our SSID's and we had to make an
emergency migration in our small town in India.  Our migration has almost
worked but there are problems.

We flashed these atheros radios to OpenWRT 18.06.2, and configured them to
run as both an 802.11s mesh point on wlan0 as well as an AP.  All eight
radios can ping each other and there are 3 gateways.  The network almost
functions without additional layer 3 routing, but not very well.

Open-Mesh had a very smooth batman-adv config on these same radios that
make everything pretty fast and fluid.  I would much rather use babeld, and
I had set it up with the default settings from OpenWRT, but the radios fell
off the net (not a logfile issue).  Then I ran it on each node with-

babeld -d1 -C 'redistribute metric 128' br-lan

(with firewall hole), and the routing table starts filling up in a way that
seems like it should work.  But the nodes lose their connection every few
minutes and reset, which I think is probably a convergence issue, but an
equal problem is that the wireless connections to the repeater nodes are
just very slow- its like babeld isn't helping the routing situation that is
causing the slowdown.  I know I am missing something about how gateways
need to be set up in this context, and I am seeking help because most of
the docs are either 404 pages now, or are about old versions, or are geared
to a quagga config that doesn't exist in OpenWRT (i.e. no vtysh)... yet it
is only now that 802.11s is even working (and well) in OpenWRT.

I would be happy to build a HOWTO or something for the current version to
help the new generation of incoming babeld users if you all don't mind a
little bit of pointing us in the right direction.

Thanks for your consideration,
Stuart
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