[OLSR-users] Dot topology plugin

[Amit Kucheria]

On Wed, 2004-10-20 at 15:44, Ignacio García Pérez wrote:

<snip>

> Yeah, I know the plugin currently only accepts connections from the loopback
> interface and in this situation a blocking is not very likely to happen, but
> I also want to modify the plugin to allow remote connections.
> 
> I've addressed this problem before: make the plugin multithreaded, one
> thread per client. The event callback creates the DOT description in a
> memory buffer protected by a mutex and signals one semaphore per thread.
> Threads wake up, make a local copy of the DOT (using the mutex to avoid race
> conditions) and then rushlessly write from the local copy to the socket.
> Note that this can use quite a lot of memory if topology is big and there
> are many clients connected.
> 
> Any suggestions of which path to take ?
> 
> Thanks.

Hi,

I have been thinking of ways to improve and use the dot plugin too, so I
will share my ideas.

I am looking at the problem from the point of view of network
visualization. Assuming there are 'n' nodes out there, each running the
dot plugin - How to get the neighbor information from each of these
nodes to a central location where they can then be aggregated to form a
complete view of the network?

Making the dot topology accessible from remote nodes seems to be the
first thing to be done as you have noted. But instead of a persistent
TCP connections to all these nodes (sucking up a lot of bandwidth), I
was thinking of a UDP connection so that I could probe the dot plugin
whenever I needed to update the topology on the central computer.

Obviously I dont have any need for multiple clients accessing the
plugin.

Regards,
Amit

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