[Babel-users] Babel news...

[Juliusz Chroboczek]

Hello to all,

I've spent much of the last two nights looking at packet traces,
hacking babel and playing with OpenVPN and OpenWRT.  The results are
as follows.

Requests for a new seqno are partially implemented -- they are
properly parsed, forwarded towards the source, but the reply is not
forwarded speedily enough, and lost requests are never resent.  What
that implies is that the protocol definition is now complete -- I'll
re-read it, and put it on the web.

Babel is now a little more aggressive when sending hellos to a newly
discovered neighbour.  Taken together, these two new features make
converging on a new route when the old one is lost dramatically faster.

You can get my head version by doing

    darcs get http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/repos/babel/

or, if you haven't got darcs,

    wget -r -l1 -nH --cut-dirs=3 http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/repos/babel/

OpenVPN basically works, but I haven't found yet how to build a multi-
point tunnel with it; in other words, to have multiple clients speaking
to a single server.  Until I find that out, there's no point trying to
build our network using OpenVPN.

I've managed to build an OpenWRT config that automatically works as
either a normal Babel peer or an OpenVPN client and Babel peer; this
was somewhat tricky, due to ntpd not noticing new interfaces and new
routes until you restart it, and the OpenVPN daemon refusing certi-
ficates when the time is not set correctly (sigh).  I needed to make
a fair number of small changes to the OpenWRT scripts, I'll get in
touch with Florian and Nico over the week-end to try to get them
merged into the OpenWRT trunk.

That's all for now.  I need a nap.

                                        Juliusz

P.S. This mail is brought to you by a Babel node.  Merci, Gabriel.