netname by id - possible?

[Jan Lühr]

Hello,

Am 03.07.2012 um 11:25 schrieb Guus Sliepen:

> On Tue, Jul 03, 2012 at 10:49:47AM +0200, Jan Lühr wrote:
> 
>>>> short one: If a server is running multiple networks - is it possible to assign networks by host-id?
>>>> I mean:
>>>> Node supplies id A on handshake -> netwerk abc
>>>> Node supplies id X on handshake -> network xyz
>>>> etc.
>>> 
>>> No. Why would you want to do this anyway?
>> 
>> Consider a set of gateway-nodes running different networks. Each network is bridged to a different vlan.
>> Eg: 
>> network A -> vlan 1000
>> network B -> vlan 1001
>> network C -> vlan 1002
>> 
>> In this scenerio a client-node has to choose its vlan by using a certain tcp / udp port. This requires new configuration to be distributed, if vlan changes occur.
>> However I'd prefer to manage these vlans on the gateway-nodes only.
> 
> Ah, I thought you wanted a routed setup, but now you are bringing layer 2 into
> the picture! I still don't know what problem you are trying to solve. Why do
> you need different VLANs, and why do you need to be able to change which one a
> node belongs to?

Sorry - I'ven't provided the full picture, yet -  let me show you how deep the rabbit hole goes ;-)
In our setup I'm thinking of two different vpns:

1st is for providing IP-connectivity to wireless clients. Each node is spanning a wireless access-points for its clients (routed VPN).
2nd is used as a backbone-vpn: Each wireless-access-point spans a batman-adv mesh-cloud (in ad-hoc-mode) for extending the network and roaming between neighboring cells. 
Since ad-hoc links can be unstable or slow, the 2nd vpn provides a layer-2 link using central servers. 

In order to keep the broadcast domains small and to reduce the batman-adv & tinc mgmt traffic, we'd like to avoid putting all clients and nodes into a single domain [1]. By that, it seems plausible to run one tinc-instance per domain. In such a scenario we need to assign nodes to domains:  Eg nodes A, B and C use network abc -- nodes X, Y and Z use network xyz. If the instances differ in their tcp/udp-port, we must redistribute our configuration on each change - that's possible but cumbersome. Mapping instances to host-ids would be easier.

If this mapping is not supported - we'll just take the redistribution way - anyway, it doesn't hurt to ask :-)

Thanks for your help,
Keep smiling
yanosz

[1]  We've seen up to 1MBit/s of mgmt-traffic (tinc + batman-adv) in a network with 15 nodes - which is way too much for our freifunk-network, that uses private ADSL-links