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[Coyo <coyo AT darkdna.net>]

So, I've put together a detailed plan for a rural neighborhood freespace 
optical network based on babel/batman/olsr, openbsd/arch linux, and Ronja.

Ronja is the key previously-missing component. Ronja is a free 
technology project for reliable optical data links. It is currently 
capable of distances up to 1.4km and a communications speed up to 10 
Mb/s full duplex.

The ronja units are easy to make, cheap, and flexible. Although some 
considerations should be kept in mind to prevent them from interfering 
with each other, fogging over, etc, it's very fast, especially when you 
make use of interesting load-balancing techniques.

With ronja, some significant problems with the kind of network I wanted 
to build in my neighborhood, a neighborhood 100 Mb/s network (as opposed 
to mostly wireless), namely, crossing public streets.

To cross public streets with a wire, you have to get permission from the 
State, which I want to avoid if at all possible. Freespace optical 
bridges in the form of ronja makes this cheap and easy.

One thing I wanted your feedback on was how to go about designing a very 
stable DNS resolver network when many links can fail at any given time. 
My understanding is that plenty of caching is a good idea.