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Babel bug discovered

It figures...   After several months of testing, a bug in the Babel implementation surfaced - naturally after a product release.  Somewhat randomly and rarely, after a reboot or upgrade, the Babel connection between two nodes will not operate correctly. Symptoms are lack of connectivity with Babel nodes, usually in one direction rather than both. If you're experiencing this, open up the panel on a Local or Neighborhood node. The issue is evidenced by the Babel Metric in the lower right having a value of -1.

Restarting Babel at either end of the connection should resolve it, as it appears to be a boot-up timing issue. Rebooting one of the nodes is the easiest way to do this.  But consider updating to production release 3.25.5.1 which will resolve the issue.

Updated date: Sunday, May 11, 2025 - 09:02


AREDN Nightly Build Update


Now we have shipped 3.25.5.0, the nightly builds will be a little different. Before we had just a single nightly build, but for the foreseeable future there will be two:
  • a nightly build, and
  • a babel nightly build.
The traditional nightly build will continue to include bug fixes and contains both Babel and OLSR. It will be the base for future Release builds until OLSR is removed.
 
The babel nightly build has no OLSR and should be considered experimental (i.e. don’t put it in places you don’t have easy physical access to). These images are identified by having “babel-” prefixed to the nightly build number. Using this has the following implications:
  • Babel-only nodes will not know about OLSR-only nodes.  So prior to trying this nightly build, ensure that all the nodes that communications must be maintained with are running at least production build 3.25.5.0, which is dual-protocol.
  • LUA support has been removed and is no longer used by the AREDN software. Be aware that Lua applications such as MeshChat are not currently supported.

Reverting procedure

If you think you might want to revert to the production release, ensure that you’ve done a backup...
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Updated date: Friday, May 9, 2025 - 20:54


AREDN Production Release 3.25.5.0

 

Major Enhancements

This release heralds some major changes with AREDN® and we encourage you to take a moment to read about them below,
 

Babel Routing

The AREDN® team is introducing Babel as a replacement for the older OLSR routing technology. OLSR has served us well, but has many problems we’ve had to live with over the years. Babel, on the other hand, has many qualities which make it a good fit AREDN®. First, it’s a loop free protocol so, regardless of how the network is changing, routing loops will never form in the network. Second, it has a   substantially lower traffic overhead so is good for slow, low bandwidth links. Third, the protocol adapts to the differences between wired, wireless, and tunneled links. Fourth, as a layer-3 routing protocol, it integrates easily with AREDN®. Fifth, it’s highly configurable. Finally, it’s simple. This video is a great primer on Babel.
In this release Babel and OLSR will run side-by-side, with Babel routing used where available, and OLSR used otherwise. No configuration is necessary. You will see a three-stars symbol on neighbors which support Babel, and a new three-stars symbol on...
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Updated date: Wednesday, May 7, 2025 - 12:28


AREDN Release Candidate Available


Nightly build 20250415 has been designated the release candidate for the next production release.

In it the AREDN® team is introducing Babel as a replacement for the older OLSR routing technology.   It's been seen to improve network stability and throughput.  In this release Babel and OLSR will run side-by-side, with Babel routing used where available, and OLSR used otherwise.  Already 25% of the nodes on the network are running a Babel-enabled nightly build and we've seen and heard anecdotally of significant improvements in network stability.

Additionally this release adds PtP (point to point) and PtMP (point to multipoint) RF modes to complement our existing AdHoc mode.  We’ve see notable throughput and latency improvements when using these modes, especially with 802.11ac devices. This  holds true even when mixing radios from different manufacturers.

Assuming no big issues arise (and it's been very calm the last couple of months of nightly builds) we expect the production release to occur early next month.

We believe this is a great release candidate.  But we encourage you to install it on your nodes where you can; we want to hear from you what you think of it!

The AREDN development team
 
Updated date: Wednesday, April 16, 2025 - 09:09

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Announcements


NG1P April 2022 Wireless Mesh Using AREDN

Bill Richardson NG1P presents his views on organizing an AREDN mesh network in Maine at the ARRL Convention in Lewiston, Maine on April 1 and 2, 2022. 
The presentation is here.


AE6XE on YouTube Hamfest 23 May 2020

Joe AE6XE described typical AREDN deployment scenarios with Ham Radio 2.0 host Jason KC5HWB. He offered advice on how to get started and choosing suitable devices.
His presentation slide deck is here.

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