On Monday 01 August 2011 16:10:41 Camila Troncoso wrote:
I´m working for some time with a wireless mesh. I have several devices with a basic linux inside (Openwrt) and they are running Batmand protocol. One of the mesh nodes acts as a gateway to internet, obtaining IP and DNS trough pppoe. The other nodes act as clients and connect to internet trough this gateway.
Do you really use batmand? There is a maintainer for this daemon, but I would say that there is no measurable difference between now and the time when no maintainer was available.
The only problem that I’m facing , is that even when the gateway creates the tunnel ( gate0) with the client node and gave it internet connectivity , it doesn’t modify the /etc/resolv.conf file, and the client node isn’t capable of resolving names (DNS).
It is a long time since I used batmand, but at least I think that the gateway functionality was never intended to be used as full replacement for DHCP. Actually, it has a complete different task scope. This means that it handles all the routing stuff, but resolving of names is a complete different topic. You would have to use an external nameserver (own server or just a free one [1]) or use a special node in the mesh as dns server. Every node has to be preconfigured with this nameserver in their /etc/resolv.conf (or better: inside the uci configuration [2]).
I don’t understand why the gateway node is not giving the client node all the necessary information of the internet connection. I suppose by protocol , if the gateway makes a tunnel , gives IP and route to the clients nodes, It also has to give them a way to resolve names (DNS).
It depends what you define as "necessary". I would say that necessary is only the ip stuff. So everything is done by the gateway... Nameserver is only optional and I don't see the reason why this is wrong.
If you really want DHCP... please feel free to use batman-adv [3]. There is also AHCP [4] for Layer3 protocols, but I never used it. At least the babel guys seem to be happy about it. This is enough to be mentioned here :) It is not meant to be used to enhance the batmand gateway stuff, but it can be used to automatically configure the nameserver instead of preconfiguring it.
To make it short: batmand is a routing daemon and not something like pppoe/dhcp/ahcp/...
Kind regards, Sven
[1] http://theos.in/windows-xp/free-fast-public-dns-server-list/ [2] http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/uci/network [3] http://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki [4] http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/ahcp/