[Olsr-dev] UUID plugin

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Jun 5, 2012, at 2:33 AM, Henning Rogge wrote:

> On 06/04/2012 10:17 PM, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
>> 
>> I've been trying to think of a good way to track a given olsrd
>> instance when doing large scale monitoring of a network.  The idea is
>> for use in test networks and debug setups rather than day to day use.
>> Things like IP and MAC addresses can change, and given some of the
>> privacy goals of Commotion and the Guardian Project, we will have
>> setups that frequently change both the IP and MAC.
>> 
>> So I was thinking there could be a plugin that generates a UUID
>> (universally unique ID, basically a giant random number) and saves it
>> to a file.  If that is loaded, things like jsoninfo would then output
>> the UUID info.
>> 
>> How does that sound?
> 
> Dependencies between plugins are a real pain in OLSRd at the moment. And constantly changing the MAC sounds like a good way to shoot yourself in the foot. ;)

Depends on what you mean by "constantly".  I was thinking that before associating with a network, the device can randomize the MAC.  That way it should make it much harder to track a given device has it hops around from network to network and back.  I can't see anything there that would shoot my feet.  This would be primarily for mobile devices.

> There is also the problem that generating an UUID is not trivial on simple embedded hardware. If you cannot trust the MAC and the IP, there is not much you can use to generate a good UUID.

If it uses the MAC and IP on the first time it generates it, then the UUID is saved to a file, that seems like a workable method.

As for cross-plugin communications, now that I think about this, it doesn't really need to be a plugin at all, but perhaps just a feature of jsoninfo.  If the file exists, jsoninfo will use its info.  And this file would be generated outside of olsrd.

.hc