I have about 40 "regular" tunnels setup with perhaps 1/3 to 1/2 active at any given time. I'm using a hAPac2 as a server with no issues. Even though there is very little real activity on the mesh most times, I'm still racking up over 100 GB of internet traffic per month. I guess the tunnels are always chattering to each other. I thought of turning off LQM on the tunnel clients (mostly hAPac Lites) to reduce this level of traffic. I reasoned that the internet links are substantially better than my RF links and probably don't need constant attention. I thought it would be a good idea to ask this forum if that would be a good idea. Believe it or not, I've done dumb things before... Any other suggestions?
Thanks,
Lee kf7yrs
Thanks,
Lee kf7yrs
ONLY 100 GB per month! That's small. I just looked at the port on my LAN switch that connects to the WAN port on my hAPac3 that serves mostly as a tunnel server / client to see how much traffic it shows. Since the counters were last reset, it has seen 2.751 TB inbound to the switch and 2.527 TB from the switch to the hAP. I don't know for sure if I have reset the counters since the last reboot of the switch (likely not), but with an up time of 239 days, if the counters have not been reset, that comes out to 11 GB per day.
I doubt that LQM is going to make much difference - OLSR however is very chatty. Upgrade your node to either the latest production or a fairly recent NB so that you can support Babel, and assuming at least some of the far ends also upgrade so as many as possible of your tunnels can become Babel, that will help with that chattiness. Note that Bable can only be supported on WireGuard tunnels - no legacy tunnels.
I have hesitated going to WireGuard tunnels since, as I understand it, clients and server need to have accurate time sources for WireGuard to work. In an emergency, the internet and associated time servers may be unavailable. We have a GPS NTP server on our mesh, and maybe that would be adequate, but not everyone is setup to use that server. We may need to move in that direction. Once again, thanks for your help!
73,
Lee