[Dump] A Babel experiment at funkfeuer.at

[Harald Geyer]

Hi Juliusz!

Unfortunately your talk last summer didn't lead to any practical
experimentation that I'm aware of. This is an attempt to get the
ball rolling again...

I want to build an as big as possible babel network quite soon and 
I'd like to get your input and perhaps also your help.

After discussing babel with other people from funkfeuer I belive
our main concern is if babel will scale to big networks with
jumpy metric values - especially if the metric values are distributed
over a wide range. So that's basically the setup I'm heading for ...
Of course I also want to learn which tests would be useful to you
for further work on babel and mesh routing.

Unfortunately we can't deploy babel on enough routers in our network
to have one big connected mesh, therefore I plan to connect several
small babel blobs via tunnels. I think you have a babel network at
your site too. I suggest that you participate in the experiment by
setting up some tunnels between your network and funkfeuer. Thus you
would have direct access to the experiment while making the network
even bigger. Perhaps you know of some other networks that could 
participate in the experiment too?

There are some other constraints that we have to meet: Most of our
devices lack any support for IPv6 so for the purpose of the
experiment we are restricted to some subnet of 10.0.0.0/8 or some
similiar setup. I would setup babel to write to it's own routing
table and have some policy rules to select this table for the
ip range we select but nothing else. The babel network would be
used for monitoring traffic but not for any real traffic of
funkfeuer.

So what needs to be done?
* Get some input on the goals and the setup of the experiement
* Finalize the above
* Make some packages at least for openwrt kamikaze and freifunkfirmware
  (used on most of our devices) which implement the above
* deploy these packages on as many devices as possible
* setup enough tunnels to make for an interessting topology


Perhaps we should take this discussion to some public place...

Harald