[Olsr-users] A thank you and a question

[Alex Masidlover]

Hi,

We've just done a reasonably successful install of an OLSRd based  
meshing network with a mix of wired and 5GHz wireless links ( 20  
Access Points and 2 cabled links - running on 15 low power Debian  
Lenny based OLSRd routing nodes). So thank you to everyone involved in  
the project. We did all of the node installations using a script we  
wrote to create the node configurations from an XML description of the  
desired network layout and in due course we will open-source this  
script.

In principle all the nodes should be identical apart from which  
sub-net they serve, which IP(s) they are on and how many network  
interfaces they have - we have one node however which will simply not  
behave in a reliable manner. Sometimes it will acquire routes to all  
the other nodes and their sub-nets without problem, however at other  
times it will only route to its close neighbours (2 of them). All of  
the other nodes on the network show (correct) routes to the 'faulty'  
node and its sub-net and if I manually add a return route to the  
routing table of the faulty node then two way traffic can be sent  
between the nodes.

I'm using HTTP info plugin to monitor each node, but apart from the  
links and neighbours simply being missing from the 'faulty' node  
nothing else is obviously wrong i.e. the links that are present show a  
link cost of 1.000 and the neighbour present only shows 1 2-hop  
neighbour in its list.

Unfortunately its not even consistent, it took several unpluggings and  
re-pluggings of cables to get it to recognise the whole network when  
first installed, has run for a week and has now gone to showing only 2  
neighbours. It also intermittently shows 1 further neighbor! - I've  
tried restarting olsrd and rebooting the box (desperation set in...)  
and for the moment I've had to leave it with the most important route  
(to the DNS server) added statically to the routing table.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I go about diagnosing the  
problem further?

Thanks,

Alex


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