Re: [Cerowrt-devel] treating 2.4ghz as -legacy?

[Michael Richardson <mcr@sandelman.ca>]

David Lang <david@lang.hm> wrote:
    >> Michael Richardson <mcr@sandelman.ca> writes:
    >>
    >>> As for having identical ESSID on the same layer-2... I think that
    >>> perhaps cerowrt/openwrt/homenet should consider a wireless AP
    >>> discovery attribute in the routing protocol, and given that, run GRE
    >>> over IPv6 ULA between APs.
    >>
    >> I was thinking something like that would be neat. I seem to recall that
    >> the homenet effort at IETF is in the process of specifying standard(s)
    >> for how multiple routes that get plugged into each other in random
    >> fashions should auto-configure themselves. In the meantime, perhaps a
    >> poor-mans version could be to have cero check, when the wan interface
    >> comes up, whether the upstream router is also running cero, and if so
    >> setup the appropriate GRE tunnels and, basically, turn off all other
    >> functionality.
    >>
    >> Some sort of negotiation would be needed, but a lua script running in
    >> the (upstream) web configuration (or even an inetd-powered pipe to a
    >> shell script) could work I guess. This could be authenticated by a
    >> shared secret (which the cero firmware would ship with), to prevent the
    >> most obvious abuse.
    >>
    >> Any reason why the above wouldn't work?

    > doing a lot of GRE tunnels could be a lot of overhead.

True.  For the average home, there might be two APs (one tunnel). For three
APs, we have either two or three tunnels (three if we support STP).

    > What I would like is something that would be easier to scale (I run the
    > wireless network for the Southern California Linux Expo and so I am a bit
    > biased towards figuring out the large scale problem)

    > What I do there is to have all the APs on the same ESSID, but them have them
    > all bridge the wireless to the wired network (a different VLAN for 2.4 and 5)
    > and then the wireless VLANs get run through a router to connect them to the
    > wired networks.

Yes, all that's great in a managed network, particularly one where one has a
proper router that can filter out the unwanted multicast from the wired
network.  The IETF does that.

    > If there is no central system, this gets a little uglier. By using multicast
    > (either explicitly or by turning the UDP unicast address into a MAC
    > multicast

There is no central system, except that homenet will provide a routing
protocl which will allow a system to elect itself master.

--
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]   Michael Richardson, Sandelman Software Works        | network architect  [
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