Hi Jan,
On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 01:39:51PM +0100, Jan Lühr wrote:
Hello @all,
I'm new to batman - so, sorry if this was discussed already...
We're up to deploy batman-adv in an wireless mesh network with multiple routers / gateways providing access to the outside world. Furthermore deploying an IPv4 / v6 dual stack networking is one goals we're trying to archive. We stumbled up on batman-adv and its gateway feature, which looks quite promising. (http://www.open-mesh.org/wiki/batman-adv-gateways) However, since dhcp is used for implementing batman-adv gateways, this feature doesn't affect IPv6 ND / icmp6 - am I right?
Yes, that's right, the gateway feature only applies for DHCPv4/6. And IPv6 ND / icmp6 is not being touched at all. Like ARP needs to be done for IPv4, also still IPv6 needs to do IPv6 ND with all hosts.
Also the IPv6 Router Advertisements, which I guess you were indirectly refering to with the icmp6, are untouched, they are still being flooded through the mesh. There were some ideas on how a batman-adv gateway optimization could look like for that, based on RFC4191, Router Preference, but some tests showed that the Router Preference in Linux was not working as expected: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ipv6.usagi.users/2242
But do you actually need that, is there a difficulty with using DHCPv6 in your use-case?
Having this in mind, what do you think is a suitable deployment strategy for IPv6 in batman-adv networks? Of course, assigning a single /64 to the mesh-cloud is a simple option, but icmp6 flooding might occur ...
As said previously, IPv6 ND will be needed anyway, so there's ICMP flooding anyway. However that's rather low bandwidth traffic and doesn't happen that frequently.
Could you describe your use-case a little further? So far no one has noticed any constraints with that in practical setups, afaik.
Thanks, Jan
Cheers, Linus