[lime-dev] small news / updates on branch develop

so i finally spent a couple of days and resumed working on libre-mesh :D * first task was to make an "altermesh-system" that would include only batman-adv, but no bmx6 or anygw magic. This would not be retrocompatible with legacy altermesh, since batman versions are incompatible (2012.4.0 vs 2014.2.0) but the setup and functionality should be similar. Thanks to the impressive modularization work made by gioacchino all these past months, it was unexpectedly simple as compiling an image with lime-system, lime-proto-batadv, and that was it, mostly everything worked out of the box :D (i didn't even needed to create a metapackage to test) So, it is all very very promising! I estimate this week we can have with nico an "altermesh" cloud running live, but based completely on libre-mesh codebase. instead of going ahead and creating the altermesh-system metapackage, i went back and refactored a little bit of code to tidy things up, addressing some bad/unexpected details i have been seeing in lime-system these past months, but didn't have time to fix yet a quick summary: * /etc/resolv.conf was overwritten, which kinda break the normal resolution system (it should only contain 127.0.0.1, and dnsmasq reads /tmp/resolv.conf.auto to find out about upstream servers) now lime-defaults.network.resolvers are copied to dhcp.(a)dnsmasq[0].server and everything works as expected again * /etc/uci-defaults/95-lime-init-enable failed with 1 on boot the whole lime-init unique-in-its-kind hack was split into scripts placed at the "expected" places: /etc/firewall.user.d/* for iptables or ebtables stuff, /etc/rc.local.d/* for other hacky stuff. * iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o $wan -j MASQUERADE needed to be manually added on gateways. Now the stock firewall system is back in place, we have the MASQUERADE rule for free. * dnsmasq-2.66-5 had a hardcoding bug on the dns lifetime announced in RAs, which triggered clients disconnect and reconnect every 20 mins (very annoying) openwrt-BB-rc1 ships with dnsmasq-2.71-3, a version where the bug is fixed (dns lifetime is now equal to router lifetime) * reworked dnsmasq-lease-share to use a different approach, instead of maintaining the leases database, and restarting every 5 minutes (yuck!) it writes a dhcp-hostsfile, which dnsmasq can re-read without a full restart. * found out another shortcoming of the anygw black magic and dnsmasq white magic: the ra-names feature doesn't work at all in lime-full, since the icmpv6 packet dnsmasq uses to SLAAC-CONFIRM hosts, goes out through anygw but comes back through br-lan, and dnsmasq misses it. So, there's no AAAA resolution at all in lime-full :( we encountered a similar issue with dhcpv4 but worked around it with dhcp-needs-broadcast. At some point, we should bump the thread at dnsmasq-discuss and look for a proper solution. * the dhcp-hostsfile approach vs leasefile-ro approach: dhcp-hostsfile has the benefit of not having to do a full restart, but on the other hand ra-names is not tried at all. Given the previous item / bug, (ra-names is not working anyway), it's better to stay with dhcp-hostsfile approach, and avoid dnsmasq restarts. will continue working tomorrow, but wanted to send huge kudos to gio for all the work done so far, a heads-up to the rest of the team, and that i'm back in business :D cheers!! gui