I have gotten a trio of mesh routers setup with batman, and had been recently recommended to install mesh11sd.
Are both needed to be installed since im using batman for bridging vlans over the mesh.
No, both aren’t needed.
Batman-adv simplifies the mesh backhaul by being able to use vlans for multiple networks over one 802.11s mesh point. But it has its downside by throttling bandwidth.
Mesh11sd is a tool with multiple functions over the 802.11s mesh points and can help you diagnose issues you may come across.
I’d recommend not using mesh11sd. In my experience, and only mine, so take it with a grain of salt, it does no good and harm if anything.
With mesh11sd installed the mesh station/ssid didnt even come up after boot. I have to manually restart the interface. This was repeatable on different routers, from old to newer ones, 2,4/5ghz. On both 22.03 and snapshot. In the log it even says the mesh is up, before mesh11sd somehow brings it down.
(On the other hand, on some of the routers it didn’t have this problem, but it didn’t do any good either)
Also the relevant 802.11s settings can mostly be set from luci.
How significant is the throughput performance of batman?
I have a 500/20 dl/ul speed. My ps4 wired through Ethernet maxes out at 205 on the download. My phone on wifi reaches about 325 on the download when I’m within a few feet of my main router. You’ll get better throughput using a WDS setup. I like Batman-adv because 1. I’m used to it and 2. It’s very very stable for me. Never gives me issues with nodes dropping off the mesh. My furthest node from the main router gets a 2x2 link from about 40 ft away at 130mbs on each link showing 80mhz VHT NSS. That’s going through 4 walls too. I am tempted to make my C2600 my main router and use one of the NSS builds for it. Right now, one of my Lyra MAP-AC2200 is the main router. The only thing stopping me is I have the C2600 on a wired backhaul because it’s dual band, while the Lyra is tri band and I have a dedicated 5ghz radio backhaul for my wifi mesh.
Thanks, the networks i use have 100mb download, so this is sufficient. I wonder how cpu dependent your speed drop is. My mesh network is made up of a linksys e8450 and two e5400s that run nothing more than the bare openwrt services and the mesh daemon
I’m running all kinds of things with over 50 devices connected throughout my house (I’m a smart home fanatic and that number is bound to grow.) On top of that, I use stubby for DNS encryption and have 3 wireguard VPN’s. I use my C2600 as a proxy server, samba server and minidlna server. The Lyra is a quad core ipq409x device, so I use irqbalance with great results, plus packet steering and software flow offloading.
Mesh11sd is for pure 802.11s networks and should not be used with Batman because Batman does it's own, similar things and will clash with mesh11sd.
For an 802.11s mesh "the relevant settings" cannot be set from Luci. Mesh11sd dynamically sets required mesh parameters that can only be done when the mesh interface is running. Attempting to set these from Luci would either be ignored or crash the wireless driver.