[Commotion-dev] Submitted DNS and configuration changes

[Will Hawkins]

On 05/10/2012 09:06 PM, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
> 
> I looked thru your pull request. I have a couple comments:
> 
> * why do you set the DNS via setprop?  Ideally there would be an Android Java API to do this.  I find that messing with things on the terminal level can cause weirdness in apps because the Android level gets out of sync with the lower level.  Here's an example we have to work on: turning off the wifi via Android/Java then enabling it via the shell script causes Android to think that there is no net connection.  Many apps rely on Android to tell them whether there is an net connection, so in mesh mode, these apps will think there is no net connectivitiy because that's what Android believes.
> 
There is an API to the properties and I initially tried to use that to
set the net.dns1 property. Unfortunately, because Android considers
net.dns1 to be a "System" property, the Java API does not allow it to be
read or set by normal user application. There is a list of the
properties accessible via the API at
http://developer.android.com/reference/java/lang/System.html#getProperty%28java.lang.String%29


As someone who never believes what they read, I tried it myself. No
luck. I had to resort to the ash script to get it to do what I wanted.


> * any reason to leave brncl_lan_gw and brncl_lan_netmask variables around?  I say delete unused variables

brncl_lan_gw and brncl_lan_netmask are required by the wifi binary
(main.cc). I didn't know if our project has "control" over that source
code so I maintained those variables for compatibility. If there is no
issue modifying the wifi source code, then I can change those variable
references and get rid of unused variables.


> 
> * the variables might make more sense as "adhoc_ip" and "adhoc_netmask" since that's really what they are.  The netmask is not used at all for the meshing since olsrd will write an route entry for each node on the mesh it knows about.  The netmask is really there for a new node to establish first contact another mesh node via standard adhoc wifi IP networking.
> 

I think that those are great names! I stumbled around for names until I
settled on the mesh_ prefix. We should change them to adhoc_ because, I
agree, those are better names.

On a semi-related note, I realized that I never quite figured out how
you prefer to be addressed? Do you prefer Hans, Hans-Christoph, Your
Highness, King?

> I also just pushed updates to make commotion-android/external/olsrd now use olsr.org/git/olsrd.git since all of my updates are now included and I have commit access there.  I included your olsrd.conf commit too.
> 
> .hc
> 
> On May 10, 2012, at 3:28 PM, Will Hawkins wrote:
> 
>> Hello all!
>>
>> I just wanted to send an update. I finished coding up some changes to
>> the OLSR mesh tether app that make it even more Commotion-compatible.
>>
>> 1. DNS: I added some code that will set a DNS server (Google's public
>> DNS, by default) while the user is connected to the mesh. There is a
>> configuration option (Advanced->Mesh) to change that value. I am going
>> to continue working on DNS "stuff" today and tomorrow. My goal is to get
>> the Android device to learn any name resolutions passed around in OLSR's
>> DNS plug-in.
>>
>> 2. Configuration: I changed some of the configuration screen
>> nomenclature and its semantics. Specifically, I changed the LAN Gateway
>> and LAN Netmask under Advanced->IPv4 options to properly reflect their
>> use for the mesh. I also added code so that the user can simply enter
>> the first quad of an IPv4 address and the client will generate the
>> remaining 3 based on the MAC address (this is how Commotion works for
>> OpenWRT devices). I changed the name of the entire configuration tab to
>> Mesh.
>>
>> I hope that these are up-to-par and that they are helpful. Please let me
>> know if there are any changes that you want made so that they fit code
>> style, etc.
>>
>> Talk to you soon!
>> Will
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>>
> 
>