walker2 is our gateway to our ISP.  It has nothing to do with batman,
but it used to.

All batman hosts have names "rpcNNN" (rpc=Rosepark Cottages).  All use
radio0 (5Ghz) as their batman bus.  Each is the dhcp server for its
own LAN, 192.168.NNN.xxx.  The WAN address of each batman server is
always 192.168.PPP.NNN, where PPP is the NNN of its (nearest) gateway
host.  The primary access to each one is (usually) radio1 (2.4GHz),
but in some nodes radio1 is disabled because it's the batman server to
the next daisy-chained 5Ghz network; its WAN IF is ethernetted to the
previous LAN.  Below, an ethernet connection is indicated below by
"-->", while a batman connection is notated "-".

Most of the routers are in other people's garages, to which I normally
have no access.  Therefore, I must be able to stand outside any such
garage and gain wireless access via 2.4 GHz, no matter what.  That's
why each router must dhcp-serve its own LAN.  (I didn't do that at
first.  At first, the gateway served all dhcp everywhere, which made a
bottleneck and a serious single-point-of-failure problem.)

These Archer C7 v[245] and A7 v5 routers support 802.11s, and batman
uses it, but that support is (very) unreliable if there are more than
3 nodes.  So: no contiguous 5Ghz mesh network has more than 3 nodes.
(I hate to admit how long it took me to figure out that the QCA
silicon/driver has that bug.  I became a pest to the neighbors and
very nearly gave up.  But now Carlos Gomes has informed me that I must
be wrong about this, because he has reliable meshes with >3 nodes
using Archive C7 v[24] hardware.)

So here's the topology:

walker2
-->rpc160-rpc153 (chan 132)
          -->rpc159-rpc154-rpc151 (chan 100)
                           -->rpc156-rpc155 (chan 116)
-->rpc152-rpc157-rpc158 (chan 116 also, but at a distance from rpc156-rpc155)

I play a lot of games with port forwarding, as you can see in the
relevant /etc/config/firewall.  Basically, any host name with "-"
appended to it is ssh-configged on my personal machines to aim at
walker2's incoming port number 2200 + NNN.  It gets forwarded as
necessary from there.  Convenient.

I want to stress that all this stuff is in production; my problem is
only that I can't move to the current software and also keep things
running.

Steve Newcomb