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neogoth
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Feature Request: Babel Support (for Freifunk Networks)

Sun Sep 18, 2022 12:27 am

I am a Member of Freifunk Franken, we provide a Network for everyone to connect to and use for free.
In metropolian Areas we have for example wireless Point-to-Point Connections for our Network. (see https://monitoring.freifunk-franken.de/map)
In this Network we use the interior gateway protocol Babel for routing.

For now we use openWRT Routers for Routing and MikroTik for Wireless Point-to-Point Connections.
Since we really like to use MikroTik in our networks it would be cool to have Support for Babel in RouterOS so we can only use MikroTik Devices if we want to connect to LTE for example.

Now if we want Freifunk for example inside a car we need a (MikroTik) LTE Router and another openWRT Router for the connection to our Freifunk Network. Same with PTP Connections over Air.

It would be nice if we could have Babel inside MikroTik RouterOS if that is possible. What do you think about that?
 
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neogoth
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Re: Feature Request: Babel Support (for Freifunk Networks)

Thu Feb 02, 2023 7:01 pm

No Statement from MikroTik?

As said it would help a lot of people if we don't need extra routers everywhere and just use a MikroTik instead.
 
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Re: Feature Request: Babel Support (for Freifunk Networks)

Thu Feb 02, 2023 7:45 pm

As said it would help a lot of people if we don't need extra routers everywhere and just use a MikroTik instead.
Wouldn't it work as a docker container on RouterOS?
 
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Re: Feature Request: Babel Support (for Freifunk Networks)

Thu Feb 02, 2023 9:09 pm

As said it would help a lot of people if we don't need extra routers everywhere and just use a MikroTik instead.
Wouldn't it work as a docker container on RouterOS?
How much is the ARM community paying you?? '-)
 
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Amm0
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Re: Feature Request: Babel Support (for Freifunk Networks)

Thu Feb 02, 2023 9:44 pm

Wouldn't it work as a docker container on RouterOS?
How much is the ARM community paying you?? '-)
Not enough to buy you a RB5009 ;). But a lot of the LTE devices are ARM, and can't imagine the code need to use Babel etc is not that large/intensive.

Their is HWMPplus (e.g. Mikrotik own distance vector protocol) that I suppose could be updated to use Babel/RFC-8966 – but IMO vector protocols haven't panned out well... So a container allow experiments to see how Babel compares with other approaches & meet the OP's immediate need for at least some subset of Mikrotik devices.
 
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neogoth
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Re: Feature Request: Babel Support (for Freifunk Networks)

Thu Feb 02, 2023 10:43 pm

As said it would help a lot of people if we don't need extra routers everywhere and just use a MikroTik instead.
Wouldn't it work as a docker container on RouterOS?
Was my thought too, but 16mb of Flash are not much. Seems impossible with that low amount of Flash Memory. Or can you just download it to ram every time it boots up??

Also my LtAP mini is MIPSBE and not Arm sadly.
 
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Re: Feature Request: Babel Support (for Freifunk Networks)

Mon Feb 06, 2023 5:06 pm

V7 does support the mounting remote volumes and ramdisks on MIPS, but NOT containers on MIPS.
V6 supports MetaROUTER that theoretically allow you to run Babel OpenWRT there - but unlike V7 there is no ram-disk or remote NFS/etc mounts, so Babel likely won't fit on the LtAP mini.

You may just have to flash it for OpenWRT instead of RouterOS, if that's even possible on LtAP mini.

If you want to experiment, all the ARMs support containers and the new ROSE remote disks in v7.8beta3 do allow remote disks (and ramdisks). So someone could create a container on that for your Babel-based network - which might be nice since RouterOS can deal with all the local networking etc, while still interconnecting with Babel.

Since a lot of other home devices beyond Mikrotik are supporting containers too, it allow may be easy path get someone on your babel network than having to flash devices.
 
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Re: Feature Request: Babel Support (for Freifunk Networks)

Mon Feb 06, 2023 6:09 pm

Babel has always been interesting to me because I work on a lot of WISPs and presumably, it would be good IGP for that use case.

That said, i've not seen a great real-world comparison between babel and ospf, is-is or even eigrp. Not having the ability to easily use MPLS and L2/L3 VPN would be challenging and given the rapid adoption of segment routing which is becoming increasingly common on RF networks for its traffic engineering capabilities, i'm not sure Babel has a compelling case to be included as an IGP.
 
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Re: Feature Request: Babel Support (for Freifunk Networks)

Thu Feb 16, 2023 3:52 pm

> That said, i've not seen a great real-world comparison between babel and ospf, is-is or even eigrp

OSPF, IS-IS and EIGRP are excellent protocols for well-administered wired networks.

What Babel aims to provide is a single protocol that works reasonably well in a slightly wider variety of circumstances. Babel is reasonably efficient on stable, wired networks, but is also competitive with dedicated mesh protocols in the pure mesh case [1], and has dedicated support for tunnels [2]. The promise of Babel is that you can use a single routing protocol instance for your whole network (with little to no human intervention) rather than using multiple protocols and redistributing routes manually between them.

Babel also has some other, more specialised, features that other protocols tend to lack (ability to perform filtering at arbitrary points in the network, not just at area boundaries, and source-specific routing[3]).

[1] https://researchrepository.murdoch.edu. ... tocols.pdf
[2] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/d ... -extension
[3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1403.0445.pdf

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