Re: [B.A.T.M.A.N.] batman network test bench

[marco tozzini <lists@java-system.com>]

Hi Elektra

Thank you for your great support
Now I have 4 station on and connected through batman

Following your tips I did setup a netcat data exchange

I had very few time to work on this project, so my main task till now  
was to turn on and connect the more station I can
In the next days I would like to check if they are still there (without 
watchdog reboot in the meantime) and are still transferring data

I hope I can achieve a serious test bench in the near future - I will be 
back with better news

Thanks
Cheers
Marco
 

elektra wrote:
> Hi Marco!
>
> You could introduce massive traffic from/to as many nodes as possible 
> and keep them running for a long time. When I did so with Ubiquiti 
> Nanostations I found that the CPU power was too low to saturate the 
> network by downloading from /dev/zero from one node to /dev/null on 
> another node. (I achieved only ~ 800 kByte/sec on a single hop link - 
> rather than 3.3MByte/sec!) I have tried this with netcat, http, ftp, 
> iperf. So I connected a laptop to the LAN port of the NS2 and 
> downloaded from the laptop via the mesh into another laptop. Which 
> seems to be highly impractical in your case.
>
> Bear in mind that depending on the version of your Foneras you are 
> rather going to learn about the instability of the hardware or drivers 
> in ad-hoc mode. Earlier versions of the Fonera have hardware stability 
> issues.
>
> Recent versions of Kamikaze trunk seem to have stability issues in the 
> Madwifi driver again - it seems like the stuck beacon problem is back, 
> I have seen messages in dmesg that seem to indicate this :-(
>
> Please check the uptime of the nodes during your tests - in case of a 
> malfunction the watchdog will silently reboot. Which is what happened 
> to me using a DIR-300 every one to three days.
>
> For me I could fix the problem - I'm exclusively using mesh networking 
> for all my IT communication needs 24/7 - why would I want to use 
> wireless point-to-multipoint networking if I can have 
> multipoint-to-multipoint wireless networking ;-)  - by switching to 
> ahdemo mode. If you are not using ahdemo, make sure you use ad-hoc 
> mode with the nosbeacon aka swmerge option.
>
> That said I prefer testing in a productive environment - of course not 
> all users are willing to bear a experimental network as their 
> productive environment ;-) But if their connectivity doesn't work in 
> the long run you as the admin will quickly get to know about it ;-)
>
> Starting a little community mesh network is a great experiment on all 
> kinds of levels, including the social non-OSI Layer 8! And you'll 
> learn about technical problems you are never going to meet in your lab 
> - because you'll see other drivers/devices in a heterogeneous 
> environment trying to connect, introducing noise and trying to create 
> IBSS-ID splits.
>
> From the protocol side we are keen on getting reports about the 
> functionality and usability, CPU load, memory consumption, protocol 
> overhead. However a mesh with 6 nodes is not pushing things to the 
> limit for the Batman protocol (well, you can decrease the OGM interval 
> to a much smaller value than 1 second!). But it will help developers 
> to find bugs in recent code changes if you happen to test new versions.
>
> Cheers,
> Elektra
>