[Battlemesh] DHCP and IP addresses

[Ryan Hughes]

> Depends on the routing protocol, which one are you asking for?
> (e.g. with batman-adv on layer two you're usually doing it quite
> different ;) ) And also depends on the network protocol of
> course, IPv4 only or also IPv6?

True.

I think my question really only applies to IPv4.  With IPv6, you'd just 
have a prefix for your network, and all the routers would know that 
prefix, and everybody would get their IPv6 addresses through 
autoconfiguration.

As for batman-adv, I figure you'd really just need one dhcp server 
anywhere on the network, since everybody appears link-local.  Though you 
might want to spread more DHCP servers around the network for reliablility 
and so that you can get an IP address faster.  I'm not sure what happens 
in a network when you have more than one DHCP server trying to give an 
address.  Does your machine respond to the first one it gets and get an IP 
address from that?

If this is how it works, then you have to choose what ranges the DHCP 
servers are handing out, which is the same problem as if you're using a 
different routing protocol, it's just that you have to do this for a 
smaller number of DHCP servers, whereas with another routing protocol, 
each router has to decide which IP range to hand out.

And I'd probably use different interfaces for the end-users on the 
network, so that their laptops don't have to speak batman or olsr.  So we 
still have to decide what addresses to give to those clients.  In a 
batman-adv network, maybe routers could get their addresses by dhcp, but 
we still have to divvy up the address space that each router is handing 
out.

Right?  Am I making any sense?

Thanks.
--Ryan