[mesh-dev] a cautionary note on setting up new babel nodes

As I am rolling out a bunch of new babel nodes, I decided to get a cluster (2 nanos and a pico) up in the lab, where I have good connectivity to the rest of the network, to replace an aging cluster by the pool. So I booted it up and configured it for the right channels and a new set of ip addresses... didnt have good LED support at all (RSSI does not seem to do anything)... I got blinkenlights to sort of work, and they were lit up, kind of solid, for some reason... [1] ...people started wandering by to complain about the network... naturally I didnt notice because I was even closer to the exit points than anyone else... ...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. (channel diversity not working did not help either) After that experience, I decided that I would make the firmware for unconfigured nodes export a 512 metric, and use a high rxcost until they were fully configured AND in place. I might disable ipv4 entirely in favor of the autoconfigured ula openwrt has, and just start configuring stuff based on the appearance of new ulas in the network. [1] if you come up with a useful LED config for nanostations and picostations, let me know. -- Dave Täht worldwide bufferbloat report: http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest/results/bufferbloat And: What will it take to vastly improve wifi for everyone? https://plus.google.com/u/0/explore/makewififast