On Die, 2007-11-13 at 01:49 -0500, Alex . wrote:
[...]
> mode to mesh mode and back to the first if needed... This would, imho,
> really improve the value of this software in great ways by enabling
> normal people to participage in a mesh without knowing a thing about
> it, just enjoying it's benefit and allowing to easily build new
> application over the mesh. (Cloning a Garmin Rhino's functionality for
> example but with many more participants/functionality?)
> 
> But for this i'd need a solution for assigning IP adresses
> automatically and, as far as i can see from my little research tonight
> about OLSR (which i haven't tried yet but read a lot of good things
> about :-), there is only one proprietary verison that was made by the
> author for a company which we can't get access to.

OLSR is an IP routing protocol. So it assumes that in some magic way the
host has it's IP addresses configured (statically, DHCP, ...).
Of course one could use the infrastructure for add on services, e.g.
telling everyone that on this host runs a DNS server or Squid cache.
But to configure the base of the communication on the lower level is
usually much more complicated.

> Was there any more effort afterward to build a clone of this solution?

None that I'm aware of but Aaron might know more as he also is /the/ fan
of that feature.

> What other choice would i have?
> I thought about using the MAC and, if it's available on the device,
> IPv6 but i wish i could simply use a plugin instead of generating IPs
> that way and needing to have IPv6 added if it's not there...

Implying that the mesh runs on IPv6. While olsrd is officially
"IPv6-ready", it is IMHO not completely up to the last (in-tree) plugin
there and I seriously doubt that the core is 100% bug free in the IPv6
field (grep for inet_ntoa and inet_aton) as I know of no mesh which
actually runs IPv6[0].
The next problem is that you need to run two instances of olsrd if you
want to use IPv4 and IPv6 in parallel. Not a big deal on normal PCs or
VIA boards but on small LinkSys WRT54GL it looks different.

For IPv4 you need duplicated IP address detection and an automatic
solution of that. And IMHO you actually need it for IPv6 too: MAC
addresses are in theory globally unique. I doubt that this is true in
practice given the vast numbers of sold network cards. And some clown
may change the MAC address at any time - if only to try it out or trying
to become a cool hacker or continuing some personal fight.

> I'd be willing to put some money on this as i believe mesh have a very
> liberating effect on networks and if others are interested we could
> have a bounty to recreate this solution which seemed nice from the
> paper i read!
> 
> So, did i miss a solution somewhere? What should i use? :-)

	Bernd

[0]: Yes, would be cool to try, but -ENOTENOUGHTIME hereover.
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