You'll have to forgive me where I sound like a smart-ass. It happens.

The FitPC2i (the current and best x86 machine I have for the purpose) that I'm presently using has NOTHING BUT USB wifi capability. The BUILT-IN interface is a USB rt2070-based radio. ANYTHING ELSE is going to be USB also (since there is no PCI expansion capability). But, it DID NOT MATTER whether or not the FitPC was the host I used, and now I can state that BMX 6/7 mattered not, or even no BMX at all (batman-adv only in use right this moment, STILL no autogw functionality).

The autogw functionality is BROKEN! At least from my perspective, as someone who would dd=of several usb / sd medium, for distribution throughout my community for the sake of EXACTLY WHAT MESH NETWORKING IS SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT...

On Mon, Mar 12, 2018 at 6:02 AM, Nicolas Pace <nico@libre.ws> wrote:
On Sun, 2018-03-04 at 17:08 +0000, Paul Harmor wrote:
> After weeks of trial and error and troubleshooting on several
> different Chef builds (1x ar71xx/wndr3700v2, 3x x86 of all different
> hardware), default LiMe 802.11s profile, I've come to the conclusion
> that watchping or some other link in the chain is failing to offer
> the gateway.

Hi Paul!

Despite your scenario is not the straightforward one (having a usb wifi
interface as WAN), if this is a common scenario it would be good to
have it included.
Please, do share with us a little bit more on why you have that setup
so we can understand the case!

> At any time, if any node loses WAN uplink, it and it's clients will
> sit without internet for hours, while still communicating with all
> other nodes and machines on the network.

Based on
https://github.com/libremesh/lime-packages/blob/develop/packages/watchp
ing/files/etc/uci-defaults/90_watchping

watchping should be trying to test the connection every 20s and if inet
found (by pinging google's dns 8.8.8.8 host) will run triggers.
If you have a vanilla libremesh setup, that means it will run this:
https://github.com/libremesh/lime-packages/blob/develop/packages/bmx6-a
uto-gw-mode/files/etc/watchping/wan-ok.d/bmx6-gw

and by doing so configuring bmx6 to be aware of that route to internet
for both your local device and your networks.

If the network falls, this gets run:
https://github.com/libremesh/lime-packages/blob/develop/packages/bmx6-a
uto-gw-mode/files/etc/watchping/wan-fail.d/bmx6-gw

so it should change the path it takes to go to internet to one
neighbour of yours.

>
> After some chat in the dev channel, the fact that I was using USB
> WiFi devices as WAN interfaces, set up with the LEDE/OPENWRT default
> WWAN iface name, became suspect as the cause. Unfortunately however,
> neither changing the reference in the watchping settings in
> /etc/config/system, nor changing WWAN to WAN as the actual interface
> used made any difference. The nodes CAN communicate (thus not the
> usual "can't ping" bug), Uplink is recognized as lost by watchping,
> but the node with one does not ever offer it up.

Based on this:
https://github.com/libremesh/lime-packages/blob/55a063678fc570000ceb99b
9382ed22ccda8fce3/packages/watchping/files/etc/uci-
defaults/90_watchping#L6

it uses the interface wan for the check... so if you add your interface
to it should do.

> Once again, this is with the default 802.11s profile, meaning BMX6. I
> have not yet tried BMX7, as I'm not sure how to migrate from one to
> the other in place.

BMX7 is not the default on LibreMesh, so you should not expect better
support there than on the default one.

Can you send the output of logread regarding this things?
Try to see what watchping says, it should be saying like the ones here:
https://github.com/libremesh/lime-packages/blob/develop/packages/watchp
ing/files/usr/bin/watchping#L63

Regards,

_______________________________________________
lime-users mailing list
lime-users@lists.libremesh.org
https://lists.libremesh.org/mailman/listinfo/lime-users