[Babel-users] Openwrt support for later versions of babeld

[Harald Geyer]

Hi Dave!

> I have been prototyping a new community wireless network down in
> Nicaragua. The terrain is hilly and well suited for meshy solutions...

Nice.

About a year ago I did some experiments with babel at funkfeuer.at in
Vienna (which otherwise runs olsrd). I think I reported most issues
back on this ML, but generally babel worked well and I consider it
a serious alternative to olsrd... 

Perhaps we can share experience. I would be very much interessted
once you have any results.


> I'm willing to build openwrt from scratch (and I think I have to,
> because most of my existing routers only have 4MB of flash and things
> like dnsmasq and udhcp can go in this configuration)
> 
> ... but I do find the prospect somewhat scary. I have a server
> co-located with isc that I could host it on if anyone was interested.

I recommend that you don't build the whole firmware from scratch but
that you install the SDK for your openwrt version and your hardware
and just compile the newest release of babel but don't touch the rest
of the system unless you have to.

What I did for my experiments was to take the openwrt-stable Makefile of
babel, merge in the changes from openwrt-trunk, tweak it to my own
needs and change the name of the package to something like 0xff-babel.

This made deploying and maintaining much easier.

> Given that I can't easily run current babel right now (will it work with
> a 2.4.37 kernel?) My experiments are limited so far. 

I did try babel on some linksys routers with 2.4 series of kernels and
it worked but there was some strange bug about corrupted IP addresses.
The archive of this list should have the details ...

> 3) Is radvd still necessary in a babel/ahcp environment?

Depends on what you are doing. If every node runs babel/ahcp then
you don't need radvd, but if you announce whole /64 prefixes with
babel and want to provide connectivity to hosts not running babel
then you will need radvd (or some static setup).
 
HTH,
Harald