[Olsr-users] OLSR Pro Active autoconfig news?

[Alex .]

> In my humble opinion:
> just post it on a website and clarify the license issues. The net
> will take care of the rest :)
> You can add docu etc any time.


I would tend to agree with that solution if time is really missing to
clean it up a bit... I can't fix it myself though but it would give
some hope ;-)


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


I'm very surprised by this, i would have thought that this feature
would have been the icing on the cake for many.
I've seen some free networks sites on the net with Wikis to assign
IPs... But that's only good in infrastructure mode where you have a
way to communicate with others before trying to start connecting to
the mesh.
I'm guessing the PAA solution can work in hybrid mode and have
portable device auto configure themself while infrastructure
(non-moving let's say) mesh nodes can force their IP so to have
services easily reachable, use a DNS without a dyndns setup, etc...


> > We could either go for a sf.net project type or on our own web-
> > site, I have to check some things first.


If you don't have time to setup things i guess an sf.net would be
great to speed things up unless there is some issue with licenses,
etc...


> > 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.

Thanks a whole lot!
I'm pretty sure some exciting application can be built once we have an
auto-mesh setuped on devices like nokia's tablet and openmoko.
More and more Linux (and who knows, *BSD?) devices are coming out these days...

> > 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 :)


At the current rate of adoption I'm not afraid to run out of a
10.0.0.0/8 network in a big town any time soon, a simple working
solution for 1024 user would do a lot of good already, i'm sure... ;-)
Also some devices don't have IPv6 enabled out of the box, so it would
require more packaging effort for now ...


> > 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..


Would avahi-autoipd be applicable to OLSR?


> >> 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'm pretty sure a mesh network at this point won't be attack proof
(black holes, clones, etc...) but i'm also pretty sure that the
benefit of being a good "mesh-izen" will outweight the idea of running
all sort of attacks against the network just because we can...
Also using encryption over the mesh might mitigate most attacks beside
low level ones.
(Of course everyone will want to test attacks once to understand the
limits, like any security admin should... but that's beyond the point
hehe :)
Also, people will tend to know each other, collaborate, etc... and
with geolocation just around the corner, a sense of involvement might
help too!


> > 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.


Intersting, I hope this can be put to good use!

Cheers everyone!
Alex


> there's no place like 127.0.0.1


except ::1 ;-)