So after some discussion /u/rusticscentedmale and I have decided to standardize on Althea as our project name.

We considered a lot of names, Hocnet is technically incorrect (and it follows that if technically correct is the best kind of correct technically incorrect is the worst kind of incorrect) not to mention difficult to talk about (is it Hawknet or Hocnet) making SEO difficult. We also ran through lots of other names I really liked Obol (coins used to pay Charon to ferry you across the river styx) but that didn't work out either, even though we did encounter the worlds must overengineered bowl in the process of researching that one.

Regardless from here on our I'll probably post updates over there. Or maybe just crosspost.

Regardless onto the actual progress for the last week, last weekend I realized that the code i wrote was about ten times as complicated as it needed to be and I made another attempt this weekend with much simplified code, good news is that it worked pretty much right away, bad news is that it seems to have revealed some issues with our testing environment and the way routes are published. So the next hangup is improving that, somehow even though the nodes are assigned ipv4 addresses they are actually operating over ipv6 and the ipv4 addresses aren't routable, meaning while we can hear advertisements by virtue of the way route advertisement works trying to send packets runs into the fact that no such routing table entry in the local kernel table exists. This probably has to do with the way we simulate many routing tables on one machine.

My attempts to get my RPI's to cooperate and make a physical testing mesh have also failed, I'm not sure if it's a setup issue or a firmware issue. I'm going to have to ask around.

I'm getting much better at working with this code and I think we can start to rely on faster changes and quicker improvements. Hopefully this means a viable demo in the coming months and a workable system by EOY.

So in the process of getting a testing script up for my code I realized that most of what I previously wrote shouldn't be required and I was over-complicating the problem quite a bit.

I think I have a better structure now and it actually seems to be sending packets, but these packets cause babel to crash, probably because they are malformed or the loop I'm using to send them is doing bad things to pointers. More formal debugging will come later this weekend.

In the meantime /u/rusticscentedmale has been focusing on handling our sybil attack and node trust problem for our theory paper. It's looking pretty solid at this point but I'll leave it to him to talk about that.

So last weekend before heading out for a conference this week I wrote up what I think should work as a multihop hello system [0]. Right now I'm looking into how to test it exactly and setting up a decent CI script for it. Once that's done we can move on to verification and expanding whatever CI we make to test convergence in the face of dishonest nodes.

Babel really is hugely easier to work with just because userspace is more familiar, even if it does bring a whole new set of problems based on the fact that we don't see every passing packet. We've found good solutions to get around those problems and frankly this is much easier to secure than Batman-adv which is well designed but not setup to handle being exposed to hostile attackers, as opposed to linux routing tables which are very secure and widely used.

[0] https://github.com/incentivized-mesh-infrastructure/babeld/tree/multihop-hello