On Wednesday, 24 June 2020 21:23:09 CEST Rob Cowart wrote: [...]

I have another question regarding batman, is there a way to connect to the nodes using only batman?

batman-adv doesn't have any special TCP like protocol or remote shell access protocol. But you can either try to find the neighbors using link local IPv6 and directly use this to connect to the remote:

ping ff02::1%bat0 # or ping ff02::1%wlan0

And if you see a couple of dups like this:

$ ping ff02::1%wlan0 PING ff02::1%wlan0 (ff02::1%22): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from fe80::84ec:1cff:fea1:5629: seq=0 ttl=64 time=1.211 ms 64 bytes from fe80::6c39:baff:fe1c:6d11: seq=0 ttl=64 time=7.107 ms (DUP!)

then you can just ssh to this node over IPv6 link local like this:

ssh fe80::6c39:baff:fe1c:6d11%wlan0

Just make sure that you are actually add the interface name + "%" separator.

We have a situation where we've deployed batman V / alfred mesh networks (in several factories in Mexico, US and China) and then found dnsmasq is not up to the task of keeping our ips straight (with 20-30 nodes per mesh even) over months and years. So we're trying to remotely change them all to static, but midway through the mesh (or whatever part of the mesh lets us ssh to the nodes) breaks down. The nodes still show on batctl pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo batctl n [B.A.T.M.A.N. adv 2018.4-23-g89ba2134-dirty, MainIF/MAC: wlan0/b8:27:eb:fb:4e:58 (bat0/d6:86:8d:7d:39:4d BATMAN_V)] IF Neighbor last-seen b8:27:eb:4e:73:6d 25.330s ( 1.0) [ wlan0] b8:27:eb:ff:0e:b6 23.320s ( 1.0) [ wlan0] b8:27:eb:08:13:37 18.850s ( 1.0) [ wlan0] b8:27:eb:aa:1e:6d 37.010s ( 1.0) [ wlan0] b8:27:eb:35:c6:77 63.590s ( 1.0) [ wlan0] b8:27:eb:e9:34:41 18.280s ( 1.0) [ wlan0] b8:27:eb:84:ca:90 30.560s ( 1.0) [ wlan0] b8:27:eb:1e:eb:cd 27.410s ( 1.0) [ wlan0] b8:27:eb:cb:80:34 23.100s ( 1.0) [ wlan0]

Not sure what the ELP interval is here but the last seen is extremely high. I would guess that the lower link actually broke down and the neighbor entries just didn't time out yet.

Also I was trying to figure out how to snoop what alfred is doing, since our MQTT goes over alfred over batman and that's what's not working...

There was a wireshark dissector written by some person [1]. But it might need some updating to get it working with newer wireshark versions.

So if you started from scratch how would you architect, is there a way to use batman for everything?

But the combination mqtt with alfred sounds weird. Alfred just stores some very simple "facts" and distributes it slowly through the network. But MQTT is a messaging protocol and is often used for realtime message transport. So in most situations you would skip alfred and just use mqtt over whatever network you want. No special batman-adv stuff needed.

Kind regards, Sven

[1] https://github.com/basros/alfred-dissector