3 ms·

Dynamic routing is the hardest part of mesh network. By using NAT martin-ger has side-stepped need to have routing altogether (it's just default gateway for eac

by kees99 9y ago

Dynamic routing is the hardest part of mesh network. By using NAT martin-ger has side-stepped need to have routing altogether (it's just default gateway for each node like that). But that of course comes at cost - reaching your device from "outside" becomes much harder. Also, ESP8266's official SDK doesn't support IPv6.

abraae 9y ago
Could you elucidate on that? I don't get how a message is somehow routed through a thicket of say 1000 of these things to get from one node to another, because NAT?
- kees99 9y ago
  "Mesh" (in thick air-quotes) here is just a way for self-organizing for shortest uplink hop count. Strict uplink-downlink hierarchy still stays regardless of whether "manual uplink" or "mesh" mode is in use. Each repeater doing Source NAT still stays. Lack of "sideways" connectivity still stays (unless you configure manual DNAT which is incompatible with "mesh" mode to begin with). I.e., if you have 3 of those ESP8266 repeaters with two clients connected to different repeaters, there is no (easy) way to have those two clients talk to each other. Let's say this is our network diagram: {The Internet}----[Cloud Server] | [Wired AP]----[Local Server] | [ESP8266-R1] | | [ESP8266-R2] [ESP8266-R3] | | [Clinet 1] [Client 2] ...then, we have two options how to make Client 1 and Client 2 talk to each other: - each client talks to the same server (local or cloud) and server takes care of passing the message; or - we configure static destination NAT (option portmap add) on both ESP8266-R2 and ESP8266-R3, and disable "mesh" mode (i.e. manually configure uplinks for all 3 repeaters); ...and arranging 1000 of those in a single string and routing a single packet through that is better avoided. "Mesh" mode helps a lot with this, by selecting shorter path to the internet and bringing topology closer to a tree, where possible.
  - abraae 9y ago
    Thanks! Will peruse over coffee

by kees99 9y ago

abraae 9y ago

Could you elucidate on that? I don't get how a message is somehow routed through a thicket of say 1000 of these things to get from one node to another, because NAT?

kees99 9y ago
"Mesh" (in thick air-quotes) here is just a way for self-organizing for shortest uplink hop count. Strict uplink-downlink hierarchy still stays regardless of whether "manual uplink" or "mesh" mode is in use. Each repeater doing Source NAT still stays. Lack of "sideways" connectivity still stays (unless you configure manual DNAT which is incompatible with "mesh" mode to begin with). I.e., if you have 3 of those ESP8266 repeaters with two clients connected to different repeaters, there is no (easy) way to have those two clients talk to each other. Let's say this is our network diagram: {The Internet}----[Cloud Server] | [Wired AP]----[Local Server] | [ESP8266-R1] | | [ESP8266-R2] [ESP8266-R3] | | [Clinet 1] [Client 2] ...then, we have two options how to make Client 1 and Client 2 talk to each other: - each client talks to the same server (local or cloud) and server takes care of passing the message; or - we configure static destination NAT (option portmap add) on both ESP8266-R2 and ESP8266-R3, and disable "mesh" mode (i.e. manually configure uplinks for all 3 repeaters); ...and arranging 1000 of those in a single string and routing a single packet through that is better avoided. "Mesh" mode helps a lot with this, by selecting shorter path to the internet and bringing topology closer to a tree, where possible.
- abraae 9y ago
  Thanks! Will peruse over coffee