[Commotion-dev] nailing down the default mesh network

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

All IPv6 would be great!  It sounds like a steep hill to get over since few
people have any experience with IPv6.  So I think we should also set an IPv4
default mesh set, since that's widely deployed and understood.

As for "borrowing" any officially assigned IP range, its really a bad idea.
The internet is based on people following the rules on a voluntary basis, and
that is part of the beauty.  As Commotion and Serval, there is no internet
police, and though both Commotion and Serval are violating the rules, no one
has been arrested or detained.  Let's keep the internet working based on
respect for the rules. Please voluntarily follow the rules, so that we don't
end up with internet police.  This should not be hard since there is no good
reason to avoid using IP ranges that have been allocated for uses like this.

Sounds like the "carrier grade NAT" RFC6598 100.64.0.0/10 was specifically
allocated for this kind of use case, and covers all the requirements that I've
heard for mesh.  Otherwise the RFC1918 private, non-routable ranges will work.

.hc


On 05/01/2013 04:37 PM, Dan Staples wrote:
> We've also been talking about using an all IPv6 ad-hoc network, while 
> providing IPv4 AP networks, whose inter-node traffic can be tunneled in 
> olsrd. Would this present any problems for meshing clients, either 
> Windows, Android, iOS, OS X?
> 
> Whichever IPv4 address block we choose, we'll have to come up with a 
> way to create unique client subnets based on the node's MAC address. 
> With the 5.0.0.0/8 network (and this would work with 10.0.0.0/8), it 
> helps to have 2 octets we can use for uniqueness (the last octet of the 
> node's IP address would be .1).
> 
> On Wed 01 May 2013 04:17:08 PM EDT, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
>>
>> One idea that we discussed at the last dev sprint last Thursday/Friday is
>> nailing down a default mesh profile that we can set everywhere.  The core idea
>> is that people can use this as the easiest way to get started, and also, it
>> can serve as the mesh config for impromptu meshing.
>>
>> Currently, we have been using this:
>>
>> SSID: commotionwireless.net
>> BSSID: 02:CA:FF:EE:BA:BE
>> Channel: 5
>> IP range: 5.0.0.0/255.0.0.0
>>
>> There are two issues that we need to address in order to nail down this
>> default profile: a valid IP range, and perhaps a unique BSSID.
>>
>> 5.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 is an officially allocated block of IPs that is actually
>> deployed in some places.  We should use an IP block that is officially
>> allocated for uses like Commotion intends.  We discussed this, and it seems
>> like the best bet is to use one of the RFC1918 private network ranges (10/8,
>> 172.16/12, and 192.168/16).  172.16.0.0-172.31.255.255 seems to be the least
>> used of the three.  It privdes 1,048,576 unique IP addresses, so plenty.
>>
>> We might want to consider using 100.64.0.0/10, which is reserved for "carrier
>> grade NAT", i.e. a large scale NATed network that is attached to the internet.
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_network#Dedicated_space_for_Carrier_Grade_NAT_deployments
>>
>> The rules for using it are in RFC 6598:
>> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6598
>>
>>
>> As for the BSSID, I think we should probably use a unique BSSID to prevent
>> collisions with other mesh networks.  02:ca:ff:ee:ba:be is used by a number of
>> other meshes.  It really could be any valid adhoc BSSID like 02:02:02:02:02:02
>>
>> .hc
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> 
> --
> Dan Staples
> 
> Open Technology Institute
> https://commotionwireless.net
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