[mesh-dev] Notes on babel and bmx6

[Alexander Papazoglou]

Marc,

My notes on your notes on firmware/babel. Interspersed amongst yours:

After playing with bmx6 for a while I thought I'd look more into babel.
> I've been trying to figure out what we'd need in order to use babel for the
> firmware. Here are my thoughts:
>
> Each node has an IPv4 subnet and an IPv6 subnet.
>
> The IPv4 subnet is assigned using makenode.
>
> The IPv6 subnet is assigned using makenode, randomly using
>
>   generate-ipv6-address from
> http://www.pps.univ-paris-diderot.fr/~jch/software/files/
>
>
I believe you will need a /32 address configured for the mesh interface,
in addition to the subnet on which the 'public' interface will be
configured, and I'm fairly sure these must be disjoint. e.g. the mesh
address cannot be on the subnet it serves to clients. I would like to
be wrong about this.

Both the /32 and the subnet must be advertised by Babel. Same for IPv6
(with a bigger number after the slash, of course).

If tunneldigger succeeds in establishing a tunnel, the node becomes an
> internet gateway and announces its route to the internet using:
>
>   babeld -C 'redistribute if eth0 metric 128' mesh0
>

I think you mean 'tun0' (or whatever tunnel name we choose), right?
This will hopefully only need to be done at boot. As of Babel 0.8 the
daemon (it is claimed) monitors the interface for up/down events.

A slightly off-topic question to ponder: Is it worth the overhead to offer
a 'private' wifi
interface, as in the current firmware? For those not familiar with this,
the firmware currently
advertises a 'private' WPA2-secured SSID which the owner of the node can
use as
their personal access point; it routes directly to the internet via their
connection without
going through the exit node. It also serves as a management interface.

My thoughts are that:

 1. There are not that many people with Internet access at home and no AP.
 2. Yet another subnet must be reserved (albeit not globally).
 3. DHCP must be done.
 4. NAT must be performed for the subnet.
 5. More radio bandwidth will be used on the same channel as the mesh.
 6. One can manage/log on to the mesh node from the mesh interface anyway.

Alex
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