Multimaster usage

[bfMendonca]

Hello !!

I have an application where I will deploy a fleet of mobile robots but I would need them to be auto-sufficient, so it would be best that every robot has its own master, regardless of connectivity with the internet.

For that purpose we setup the " fkie multimaster" package so that the robots can exchange some information when connected. For the multimaster to work correctly we need to be able to ping a broadcast address (224.0.0.1) through the husarnet interface.

Is that possible? If I'm not mistaken using broadcast needs the interface to be a tap interface which will relay also layer 2 data.

It is possible to achieve that?

Thanks in advance!

[pidpawel]

Hi! Thanks for a detailed description of your usecase (and sorry for a lack of a response for such a long time - we're still figuring out some ticketing systems for cases like this one).

When it comes to the master hostname management - unfortunately we will be slowly phasing out our support for setting those up explicitly, but we will be adding some mechanisms that'll allow you to fake that behaviour. I don't have any concrete details yet as this is still in the works, but we will definitely be describing them on our regular channels (blog posts, newsletter,…).

When it comes to multicast (especially the IPv4 one) would be for you to use technology called VXLAN that creates a virtual L2 interfaces over regular UDP (IIRC) networks (in this case via Husarnet). The setup for that shouldn't be too difficult as VXLAN is natively supported in Linux and also a well established protocol. We do plan on making a short blog post about cases like this one but, as usual, there's so much work to be done that it's constantly getting postponed.

If you have any questions (even a detailed, technical ones), please do not hesitate to ask. Have a wonderful day Paweł