On Sat, Aug 06, 2011 at 10:19:28AM -0400, Ryan Hughes wrote:
So, I had a crazy idea the other day:
Normally, when I talk to people about mesh networks, they assume that there is some central authority assigning IP addresses to nodes intelligently.
I was thinking, though, that I'd rather have it so that every node could have the same firmware, and you'd just throw the node up and it'd negotiate everything for itself, including its IP address.
Why reinvent the wheel? I would argue that using IPv6 stateless autoconfig
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#Stateless_address_autoconfiguration_.28SLA...
and then working to provide a mechanism to support 'legacy' IPv4-only clients would be a beter solution than a lot of the hoops we have to jump through to support distributed dhcp cleanly.
My thought is every node runs radvd (ipv6 equivalent of dhcpd), and any ipv4 traffic will get tunneled over the v6 mesh network to the closest exit node with upstream IPv4 net access, which is where the DHCP server would run.