Using OLSR on Ethernet and Multiple Interfaces

It is not necessary to have a wireless interface to test or use olsrd -although that is what olsrd is designed for. It may as well be used on any NIC. WiFi interfaces don't have to operate always in ad-hoc mode to form a mesh when mesh nodes have more then one interface. For dedicated links it may be a very good option to have them running in infrastructure mode. Many WiFi cards and drivers are buggy in ad-hoc mode, but infrastructure mode works fine - because everybody expects at least this feature to work. Ad-hoc mode has not had many users so far, so the implementation of the ad-hoc mode was done sloppily by many manufacturers. With the rising popularity of mesh networks, the driver situation is improving now.

Many people use olsrd on wired and wireless interfaces - they don't think about network architecture. They just connect antennas to their WiFi cards, connect cables to their Ethernet cards, enable olsrd to run on all computers and all interfaces and fire it up. That is quite an abuse of a protocol that was designed to do wireless networking on lossy links - but - why not?

They expect olsrd to be an ueberprotocol. Clearly it is not necessary to send 'Hello' messages on a wired interface every two seconds - but it works. This should not be taken as an recommendation - it is just amazing what people do with such a protocol and have success with it. In fact the idea of having a protocol that does everything for newbies that want to have a small to medium sized routed LAN is very appealing...