On Wednesday, July 12, 2023 6:29:50 AM CEST petermilani80@gmail.com wrote:
Hi All,
I've just started using batman and was trying to see if I could get it to work over a serial radio link such as the simple serial devices commonly used in cheap drone telemetry. The goal here is to enable low bandwidth but adhoc ip networking.
I had set up a pair of radios to connect using pppd and I was wondering if I could utilise batman to try and create a mesh. An example of setting up the serial ports as ppp interfaces:
$ sudo pppd /dev/ttyUSB0 57600 noauth nodetach 10.42.5.5:
That works fine but applying batman to that interface was unsuccessful. I think that was due to limitations in the ppp and interfaces created by pppd: e.g.
$ sudo batctl if add ppp0 Error - failed to add interface ppp0: Invalid argument
The interface ppp0 was specified as POINTTOPOINT e.g.
$ ip link $ ppp0: <POINTOPOINT,MULTICAST,NOARP,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel state UNKNOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 3
I'm not an expert in this so don't have full visibility of all the tools available. I was wondering if there were better ways to set this up, possibly not using pppd? Any guidance would be appreciated.
cheers Peter
Hi Peter,
batman-adv requires an Ethernet compatible interface (Layer 2) to operate. PPP interfaces are Layer 3 interfaces (IP Layer), so that will not work. You could make a L2 tunnel over your PPP interface such as l2tp or vxlan and use that. Or perhaps there is a different/better way to enable an Ethernet Link over your drone radio directly ....
Cheers, Simon