[Olsr-users] OLSR Pro Active autoconfig news?

[Roar Bjørgum Rotvik]

Bernd Petrovitsch wrote:
> On Die, 2007-11-13 at 01:49 -0500, Alex . wrote:
> [...]

[...]

>> 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.

I'm a guy working for this company :)
It was our plan to release this code, and I announced it on this mailinglist a long time 
ago. But unfortunately I have not had time to properly clean up the code so we could 
release it..
The project is called PAA (ProActive Autoconfiguration) by the way, and the first version 
was designed and implemented by Andreas Tønnesen while he had a summer job in our company.

And since my announcement nobody have asked for it (before now), so it had slipped below 
my radar (i.e. I forgot about it).

To only clean up code to relase it should not take too long time, but as in many projects 
is it not enough to just release code, one also need infrastructure to handle 
documentation, patches, user feedback and so on. So far I have not had time to do this..
We could either go for a sf.net project type or on our own web-site, I have to check some 
things first.

But I'm not able to give any fixed deadline for this, but I'm willing to take a look at it 
again. I see the benefit of a community to test and explore this solution and come back 
with some feedback.

A possible downside is that this autoconfig solution only supports IPv4 today. But as all 
code this is fixable if somebody has time to do it :)

>> 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.

I'm also personally interested in IP Autoconfig, having watched zeroconf and such for some 
years, so I'm also interested to know of any possible duplicate effort on this..

>> 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...

[...]

> 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.

The PAA solution consists of a standalone deamon and a OLSR plugin. The plugin is used to 
flood DAD and IP requests in the mesh, using the flooding mechanism in OLSR.

-- 
Roar Bjørgum Rotvik