wired-mesh.rst

Wired mesh (Mesh-on-WAN/LAN)

In addition to meshing over WLAN and VPN, it is also possible to configured wired meshing over the LAN or WAN ports. This allows nodes to be connected directly or over wireless bridges.

Mesh-on-WAN can be enabled in addition to the mesh VPN, so multiple nodes in the same local network that is used as VPN uplink can also mesh directly. Enabling Mesh-on-WAN should be avoided if the local network is also bridged with a WLAN access point, as meshing over batman-adv causes large amounts of multicast traffic, which will take up a lot of airtime.

Enabling Mesh-on-LAN will replace the normal "client network" function of the LAN ports, as client network ports may never be connected (so care must be taken to always enable Mesh-on-LAN before connecting two nodes' LAN ports).

Configuration

Both Mesh-on-WAN and Mesh-on-LAN can be configured on the "Network" page of the Expert Mode (if the package gluon-luci-portconfig is installed).

It is also possible to enable Mesh-on-WAN and Mesh-on-LAN by default by adding mesh_on_wan = true and mesh_on_lan = true to site.conf.

Commandline configuration

Mesh-on-WAN

It's possible to enable Mesh-on-WAN like this:

uci set network.mesh_wan.auto=1
uci commit

It may be disabled by running:

uci set network.mesh_wan.auto=0
uci commit

Mesh-on-LAN

Configuring Mesh-on-LAN is a bit more complicated:

uci set network.mesh_lan.auto=1
for ifname in $(cat /lib/gluon/core/sysconfig/lan_ifname); do
  uci del_list network.client.ifname=$ifname
done
uci commit

It may be disabled by running:

uci set network.mesh_lan.auto=0
for ifname in $(cat /lib/gluon/core/sysconfig/lan_ifname); do
  uci add_list network.client.ifname=$ifname
done
uci commit

Please note that this configuration has changed in Gluon v2015.2. Using the old commands on v2015.2 will break the corresponding Export Mode settings.