[B.A.T.M.A.N.] batman for production

[B.A.T.M.A.N.] batman for production

[Walter Robert Ditzler]

hi sven,

first: sorry about replying that way - i have an account but somehow i
couldn't post anything here!

second: i have a working test environment running, all works great, but i am
not familiar with the update mechanism of batman. I don't want to replace
any good version if the latest kernel has already the best possible version
of batman.

third: here are actually my doubts. to configure a mesh within batman you
normally use batctl. so are those patches for batctl or for the batman-adv
itself and how can I get the right batctl corresponding to the batman-adv
version from kernel.org 3.6.3?

or is it even better to configure batman-adv via the sys classes (echo bat0
> /sys/class/net/eth0/batman_adv/mesh_iface)?

thanks a lot,

walter



-----Original Message-----
From: Sven Eckelmann [mailto:sven@narfation.org] 
Sent: Sonntag, 28. Oktober 2012 15:34
To: Walter Robert Ditzler
Cc: b.a.t.m.a.n@lists.open-mesh.org
Subject: Re: Re: [B.A.T.M.A.N.] [PATCH 16/16] batman-adv: add kernel-doc for
enum batadv_dbg_level

On Sunday 28 October 2012 14:32:46 Walter Robert Ditzler wrote:
> hi batman list,
> 
> i recently saw there is a bounce of email in the batman community 
> regarding patches.

Please don't reply to a random posts to start a new topic. And don't write
to the Linux networking mailing list and the Linux networking maintainer
David S. 
Miller when you actually want to ask the "b.a.t.m.a.n mailing list".

And yes, you will see patches going over this list the whole time. Either
because somebody wants to get stuff integrated into some B.A.T.M.A.N.
related project or because the patches were sent to our Linux networking god
David S. 
Miller.

So nothing unusal happened.

> is it safe and reliable to use the version from the open-mesh.org
> site:
> 
> - inux 3.6 => batman-adv 2012.3.x (get batctl 2012.3.x from here)

Ehrm, ehrm, ehrm, ehrm, oehm, aehm.... I will not guarantee anything. It is
safe to use this stuff until anyone proofed it otherwise. But we have some
fixes in the maint branch which weren't released yet in form of 2012.3.1 or
2012.4.0. But they are included in the stable releases of Linux 3.6.x

> for production use onto the following configuration:
> 
> os: debian 6.0.6
> kernel: 3.6.3, batman activated
> arch: geode lx and amd64

Now you baffled me completely. Linux 3.6.3 is the stable release which
includes batman-adv 2012.3.0 + stable fixes. And you want to replace it with
2012.3.0 without these stable fixes. Can you give me a reason why this
sounded to you like a good idea? Even without these stable fixes... why
would you replace the in-kernel module with the out-of-tree module of the
same version?

Kind regards,
	Sven

Re: [B.A.T.M.A.N.] batman for production

[Sven Eckelmann]

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On Sunday 28 October 2012 20:13:26 Walter Robert Ditzler wrote:
> hi sven,
> 
> first: sorry about replying that way - i have an account but somehow i
> couldn't post anything here!

There is no difference for the mailman when you reply or directly write. You 
only have to make sure you don't write html mails.

> second: i have a working test environment running, all works great, but i am
> not familiar with the update mechanism of batman. I don't want to replace
> any good version if the latest kernel has already the best possible version
> of batman.

We don't have an "update mechanism". We release a version after most stuff was 
merged for the next linux version (which would be 3.7 for 2012.4.0). Maybe we 
release a minor update (2012.3.1 for example) before the next release when 
something horrible broke. So it is ok to use the latest stable kernel when you 
don't need special features and are happy to compile everything from one 
source.

But some projects cannot use the latest kernel for different reasons, but want 
to use features from the latest batman-adv release.

> third: here are actually my doubts. to configure a mesh within batman you
> normally use batctl. so are those patches for batctl or for the batman-adv
> itself and how can I get the right batctl corresponding to the batman-adv
> version from kernel.org 3.6.3?
> 
> or is it even better to configure batman-adv via the sys classes (echo bat0
> 
> > /sys/class/net/eth0/batman_adv/mesh_iface)?

"Better" depends on your metric. But you usually check the download page or 
the output you see when you load the module to find a a version number. Just 
choose the version of batctl with the same version number.

And batctl only uses the sysfs and debugfs interface to configure it. But it 
has some nice extra feature which can assist you.

Kind regards,
	Sven

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Re: [B.A.T.M.A.N.] batman for production

[Sven Eckelmann]

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On Sunday 28 October 2012 20:13:26 Walter Robert Ditzler wrote:
> so are those patches for batctl or for the batman-adv
> itself and how can I get the right batctl corresponding to the batman-adv
> version from kernel.org 3.6.3?

Forgot to answer the first part of the question: Depends on the patch. We 
don't send batctl patches to David S. Miller. So the latest set of patches 
were only for batman-adv. But usually you can check it by looking for "batctl: 
" or "batman-adv: " in the subject line. And you can easily find patches for 
batctl in the mail archive of this month.

Kind regards,
	Sven

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