Hi folks,
the B.A.T.M.A.N. team is releasing the second bugfix and maintenance release of the 0.3 batman daemon which also contains smaller enhancements in various areas. It's mostly an update to batman 0.3 and does not contain major routing protocol changes. We offer precompiled packages http://downloads.open-mesh.net/batman/stable/binaries/ as well as signed source tarballs: http://downloads.open-mesh.net/batman/stable/sources/
In the past many new users experienced difficulties using batman to connect to the internet as it was necessary to enable NAT on the tunnel manually. With this release we address this issue. The batman daemon will try to locate the iptables binary to setup the masquerading automatically. This behaviour can be disabled using the "--disable-client-nat" option. If the outgoing packets are not masqueraded (the iptables binary wasn't found / the automatism disabled) batman will switch to the "half tunnel" mode which operates without masquerading. This mode requires the gateway to have a routing entry for each client that accesses the internet (e.g. non-batman clients may be announced via HNA).
The whole HNA code has been rewritten and now supports multiple nodes announcing the same network segment. You may have one non-batman network but several entry points to it. All border nodes can announce the same network. Receiving batman nodes choose their entry point based on the best TQ value available. The packet aggregation that exists since batman 0.3 has been enabled by default.
Thanks to Benjamin Henrions persistence the hop penalty was modified to make use of multi radio interfaces to maximize throughput. Nathan Wharton and Sven Eckelmann debugged alignment issues on Avila boards. Sven also improved the kernel routing communication and contributed many more patches. Antoine van Gelder developed an extension for the vis server that allows the vis server to export its data in the JSON format if it was started using the "-j" parameter.
In the coming months we want to focus on improving the protocol. Therefore we will start the batman 0.4 branch soon.
Happy routing, The B.A.T.M.A.N. team