On Friday, January 04, 2013 23:12:59 NicoEchániz wrote:
Selection class 3 and beyond do change the gateway when a better one becomes available. But as you correctly pointed out these selection classes don't consider the announced bandwidth for the simple reason that nobody cared. In most wireless scenarios (the main playground for batman-adv) the path towards the gateway turned out to be more critical than the gateway's pipe to the internet.
Feel free to propose something if you care about having this option. The necessary code shouldn't be too hard to add. Backward compatibility will be more difficult to achieve.
I believe that those of us who chose to use selection class 1 would prefer if it were "dynamic". So if a new gateway appears, then the client would evaluate with the same previous criteria if it is better or not (considering "the gateway's advertised throughput as well as the link quality") and switch accordingly. I see no reason why when someone chooses selection class 1 she would be expecting to choose the best available gw once and not ever check again.
If a network is stable, when a new better gw appears in some area it won't be selected until nodes are restarted, and that might be a long time.
You misread my statement. Nobody needs to be convinced of the usefulness of such a feature (at least for what concerns myself). Somebody needs to come up with a solid proposal which then needs to be implemented. That is what I meant by saying "Feel free to propose something [..]".
Note that switching immediately as soon as a better gateway comes around isn't the best solution. Imagine a case in which a gateway announcing the highest bandwidth in your network barely is visible for your gateway client. It will keep switching between gateways, thereby breaking all your stateful connections such as: ssh, vpns, video & music streams, etc
One other change that might be interesting would be the addition of a setting for how much the advertised throughput affects gw selection. I've seen Jan uses 96/96Mbit as advertised throughput on one router; I do the same on our "main gateway", but maybe it would be better if we could actually advertise the real throughput and have a setting to control how much the bandwidth difference affects the selection.
Again, feel free to propose something which can be discussed.
Cheers, Marek