mesh portal discovery

[Michail Bletsas]

David Woodhouse <dwmw2 at infradead.org> wrote on 01/09/2008 02:40:46 PM:


> We can also
> check the mesh path length to the origin of each RA we see, and choose
> the best one.
> 

The way this was originally implemented in a way that can be used for any 
"well defined" service (not just network gateways), 
was to assign an anycast MAC address to such well defined services.

So when a node is looking to see if there is another node providing such a 
service in the mesh, all that it has to do is a path discovery for the MAC 
address corresponding to that service. If the path discovery is 
successful, both the presence of the service as well as the optimal path 
to it has been discovered.

In the case of the mesh portal (A NAT Internet Gateway in our case) we 
need to get back the IP address of the gateway as well as DNS info.
A simple python server listening at a predefined port was providing that. 
That simple server has been replaced by a complete DHCP server in our 
current implementation.


M.