24 Jul
2013
24 Jul
'13
6:52 p.m.
My thoughts.
The IPIP / JNOS network is an anachronism that is quant but doesn't take
advantage of how technology has evolved. I'm a pretty skilled network guy
but the current IPIP tunnel system has eluded me. I have gotten close, but
finally thrown my hands up each time. (I never get the rip44d to run and
find the proper password.)
However, I can get a VPN tunnel running in short order which can bring an
address range to whatever location is on the full Internet. I have a
personal class-C at home that has functioned over a VPN for over a year and
I have VPN'ed to another Net-44 gateway with success. (In both cases on
inexpensive MikroTik routers.)
I think we need to work on connectivity of the gateways to unify Net-44 and
treat the "on air" connectivity as a separate task. Whether the on air
connectivity is for IP over AX.25 at 1200 bps, WiFi/HSMM, D-STAR Digital
Data, or some new transport over RF. It doesn't do a lot of good to have
islands of on air activity without interconnectivity of Net-44. Otherwise
just use RFC 1918 address space and NAT it to the Internet.
My vision is that we have multiple BGP gateways on the Internet. Some may
advertise the whole of 44/8 and others may have smaller networks, clear
down to 44.x.x.x/24 Some will be multi-homed, some will not, but all would
be advertised to the Internet for routing. Any router advertising all of
44/8 would need to know about all routes for anything with a CIDR of less
than /8. I don't think we really want all traffic to go to 1 or 2 routers
advertising 44/8 or we're back to the everything must go through UCSD
scenario of the last couple of decades.
My recommendation is to find ISPs who are willing to 'donate' bandwidth and
routing for some number of BGP'ed networks, then place routers at those
ISPs which will support authenticated VPN service to local networks.
Say we had an ISP (or University, etc.) that would donate bandwidth for
44.24.0.0/16 and 44.12.0.0/16, 44.26.0.0/16, and 44.40.0.0/16 and BGP
advertise those ranges. Let's another data center wanted to BGP
44.24.100.0/24. Traffic would flow to the best gateway for each. If
44.24.10.0/24 didn't have the ability to BGP its own address space, it
could VPN to the router at the major gateway (ISP) and that router would
tunnel traffic for that network to the gateway for 44.24.10.0/24. Then
there might be a small on the air network at 44.24.128.0/28 and its gateway
would VPN to the 44.24.10.0/24 router who would route traffic for the small
network.
This would mean that no special tables need to be passed around. Each
router would know the addresses it was responsible for and would route all
other 44 traffic to its "upstream" and non-44 network traffic to the
Internet through their service provider.
This means the "heavy lifting" of BGP and network routing would be handled
by those ISPs where the expertise exists and a new member of Net-44 could
simply setup a simple router that VPN'ed to an upstream router to get its
traffic and to send Net-44 traffic, all other traffic would simply pass
over local service provider's network.
This is all readily available, off the shelf, technology. For the end user
it is very inexpensive to setup a router with VPN. Then the local
distribution over RF can happen over whatever technology is available,
whether a TNC and FM radio, WiFi dongle, UDR56k-4, Bullet, etc.
------------------------------
John D. Hays
K7VE
PO Box 1223, Edmonds, WA 98020-1223
<http://k7ve.org/blog> <http://twitter.com/#!/john_hays>
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