[gentoo-user] OT: BATMAN vs frr/ospf

[William Kenworthy]

  

    
  
  
    Hi all, has anyone had experience using the batman-adv protocol
      and can comment on its use instead of ospf?
    The recommended "drop in" replacement for quagga/ospf based
      routing with the frr/ospf package has proven to be a less than
      stellar replacement in my case (not really frr's fault, but it is
      not identical to quagga and my requirements are complex) so I am
      looking to jump ship to batman.�� I am currently building kernels
      and vm's to test but I would appreciate comments from someone who
      has done this already.
    My networks include ~10-15 vlans that extend across (open)vpn
      tunnels and multiple wifi SSID's and have a number of potential
      looping scenarios that ospf manages.�� I use zeroconf (for
      homeassistant) and have lxc based instances using veth interfaces
      for services (asterisk, web, dns, ...).�� There is a moosefs data
      store on its own switch and two dedicated vlans.�� I have in excess
      of 30 devices on the network and ESP IoT devices are multiplying
      like rabbits (!) All non-esp or android phone systems use gentoo
      on arm32/arm64/intel, run shorewall, have multiple vlans via
      trunking or multiple interfaces in different vlans or in some
      cases up to 4 interfaces bonded for throughput.�� I am using d-link
      managed switches and a homebrew AP using hostapd in the 2.4 and 5g
      bands. 
    
    Using quagga/ospf was mostly stable and just worked.�� While I
      could try tuning frr to work more reliably (worst problems are not
      staying converged, convergence time (which sometimes kills vm's
      via the moosefs data store disappearing off the network for
      minutes at a time), fighting frr's interference in ip forwarding
      across multiple interfaces and excessive overhead as it never
      seems to settle for long).�� I am thinking the effort might be
      better spent on batman - I am attracted to the supposedly fast
      convergence, minimal overhead and the potential of meshes (IoT)
      using the flat routing overlay it implements.
    Questions I have are:
    1. easily works with shorewall
    2. it actually does have fast and glitch free convergence
    3. internetworking across a VPN based�� WAN with batman at either end
    4. mesh hot spot control
    5. any other gotchas?
    BillK