Hello all,

I was posed a question this evening by a ham who has 2 mesh nodes on a tower. One at 90 ft. and another at 60 ft. The one at 90 feet has a parabolic pointed in one direction for sake of discussion. The other has a parabolic pointed in a different direction and also an omni for local coverage. Because of the vertical separation and antennas used, neither unit can see the other!

Question: Is there a way to use either the wan ports or one of the the switched ports and tie the 2 units together so that they become part of the mesh and route traffic to and fro?

My thoughts would at first be to get into each unit with ssh and do some command line magic. Maybe setup a bridge device br0 between the wireless lan device and one of the ethernet devices in effect bridging the traffic. Doing this on both units and connecting with a cat 5 cable?

What I'm wondering is if the OSLR router will know if the adjacent node is a close neighbor or not, and what will happen to the routing entries learned in the OSLR routing tables.

Any insight, thoughts, ideas would be appreciated, I just started to think about this tonight, I'm a network engineer and have worked on linux routing schemes in the past, but nobody works good in a vaccum so anyone with experience please send me ideas.

73 de KF7PSm

Ok, I figured it out by reading the thread on how to connect remote geographical mesh areas via gre tunnel over the internet. This is what I did with the latest software.

I configured both units by disabling the WAN interface and turning off the DHCP on the LAN interface because I was connecting these to an internal lan hooked to my computer. My computer's interface has an ip address of 172.27.0.5 and so I setup 1 unit with 172.27.0.1 as the gateway device and the other as 172.27.0.6. This way I could get into both units from my computer by moving the ethernet cable to and fro. I also put a default route on my computer for the 10.0.0/8 network to 172.27.0.1 (the gateway device to the mesh for my local lan). This way when I click on my browser and it wants to go to 10.0.0/8 address (I.E. A MESH ADDRESS) it knows how to get there!

I then logged into each unit one at a time and did the following:

In /etc/config I edited olsrd.conf and removed the # comment designator from the line that read

InterfaceDefaults {
   #Ip4Broadcast      255.255.255.255
}

This tells the routing daemon to broadcast routes out every interface. This was suggested in the tunneling example. I also changed the line below that that read

Interface "wl0"

And added the Ethernet interface to it so it looked like this:

Interface "eth0.0" "wl0"

Then I edited /etc/config.mesh/olsrd.conf

I changed the same InterfaceDefault line like above by removing the # sign from Ip4Broadcast thereby uncommenting the line. Then a slight bit below that I changed

Interface <olsrd_bridge>

by adding the ethernet interface to the list of interfaces so it looks like this:

Interface "eth0.0" <olsrd_bridge>

Then reboot and Voila. I changed the SSID on the 172.27.0.6  node so they could not see each other over wireless, plugged an ethernet cable between them and wham the mesh propagates properly.

The only annoying thing is that the OLSR daemon publishes the interface links onto the mesh, so when you look at the mesh status page you see the 172.27.0.100 on one and 172.27.0.1 on the other. If someone knows how to tell olsr to ignore those then it would be 100% Perfect!

73 de KF7PSm