[Cerowrt-devel] potentially dropping mesh networking from cerowrt rc8 [#201]

[Shane Turner]

[Re-posting to list. Accidentally sent directly to Dave previously.]

Although I thought the idea of mesh networking would be interesting, I 
never had a chance to play with it at home. I think we're better off 
with removing it for the time being. It might be worthwhile recording 
what was learned in trying to get it to work, and what bufferbloat 
considerations there are related to it.

Shane

On 06/12/2011 12:39 PM, Dave Taht wrote:
> This is the second of a series of emails discussing things that may be
> dropped from the next release of cerowrt, and is intended to open the
> discussion, only.
>
> The goal is to find better ways to focus on fixing bufferbloat.
>
> While I personally find babel very useful, as well as AHCP, convincing
> anyone that these two bleeding edge technologies are worthwhile on
> places like the homenet mailing list is an incredible struggle. The
> consensus there appears to be leaning towards ospf, not that anyone on
> that list has bothered to test that, either. We have had the ability
> to use ospf in the system since day one as an optional package.
> Routing, actually, is not needed in simple setups.
>
> Other problems:
>
> 1) The AHCP package in openwrt keeps breaking. It broke of the late
> rc7-smoketest6-ish series, and so far as I know, hasn't been fixed.
>
> 1a) The gui interface, even when the package was working, is equally
> problemantic
>
> 2) Firewalling remains REALLY problematic with both babel and AHCP.
> More often than not, you end up with stuff
> that doesn't work.
>
> 3) Packet loss as a metric appears to not be a good metric anymore.
>
> 4) As much as I enjoy mesh networking,  the few people that have tried
> to set it up independently that I know of, have all failed.
>
> And lastly,
>
> 5) As pointed out during a test in brussels, cerowrt itself has become
> too complex even for someone familiar with openwrt to deal with it.
>
> So with no real users of these subsystems in the field, these two
> packages can be safely dropped.
>
> There were some positive benefits to being able to test ad-hoc mode,
> having the interfaces available at all times, etc, but deleting the
> extra interfaces and firewall complexity would help.
>
> While I believe that a pure mesh environment works a LOT better than a
> pure 'as we know networking today' environment, however, the attempt
> thus far,
> of merging the 'best of' the two, seems to be worse, than either.
>
> This eliminates having to fix bugs #252, #110, #112, #201, and I've
> never got around to mentioning how much I was hoping for dhcp/ahcp
> integration.
>