[Commotion-discuss] Send mesh routes to upstream router

[Josh King]

Hi Christopher,

There are a few different ways you could approach this. I can think of
three right off the bat, but there may be more. They all have their own
advantages and disadvantages:

* You could run BGP or similar on the nodes or on the edge router; they
would share the kernel routing table with OLSR, but as long as it's set
up in such a way that they don't clobber each others' routes it should
be fine. I'm not familiar enough though with setting up BIRD,
Zebra/Quagga, or similar to know exactly how to configure it to pass
along all of the OLSR routes as well.

* You could split it up by subnet and configure the routes statically.
The problem here is that all Commotion nodes self-select their
addresses out of the same private subnet, so you'd need to configure
the nodes to select out of separate subnets manually.

* Since the nodes already run a dynamic routing protocol (OLSR), you
could create a VPN tunnel between the two networks. Then they can
dynamically pass their routing traffic themselves between the two
networks. This would require setting up a VPN tunnel, and could
potentially experience performance issues as the network scales (OLSR
is a chatty protocol to be sending over a narrow VPN pipe).

Hopefully that helps. Let me know if you have any thoughts.

On Mon, 2016-07-04 at 14:45 -0700, Christopher Munz-Michielin wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> Just starting to play around with the Commotion firmware as I'm part
> of 
> a group of ham radio operators looking at starting a localized mesh 
> using ubiquiti M2's.  So far I'm impressed by the firmware but did
> have 
> one question: Is it possible to run a dynamic routing protocol (such
> as 
> OSPF, BGP or RIP) to send information about the connected mesh
> devices 
> to an upstream router?  Our architecture would be something like
> this:
> 
> Internet------------Edge Router---------------Mesh 
> node-------------------Additional mesh nodes-----------local subnet
>                                      |
>                                      |
>                          Non mesh network
> 
> I can add static routes to the edge router, but doing so would be 
> cumbersome and potentially time consuming, especially if we are
> adding 
> new nodes frequently so a dynamic protocol would be preferred.
> 
> Cheers,
> Chris
> 
> 
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-- Josh King
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