Re: [44net] routable or private?

HAM-Radio nowadays is so much more then just "Radio". HAM-Radio spans almost every technical discipline out there, and is very good in being used for educational purposes. who build and repair tranceivers, the hams who setup (ham)-voice over ip like echolink/dstar/.. and every ham who thinkers on a subpart of "ham radio" in between and beyond. The 44net also has a place here, for the ham who likes to experiment with networks, but just likes to go a bit farther then his own home lan network into something bigger. The 44net. Basically IP can run on anything, so it can run in AX25 radio, PPP tunnels between machines, tunnels over the public internet, the public internet itself, wifi, sattelite, dstar, and possible technologies to come. HAM-Radio for me is still about experimentation. And I am from a generation where the commercial internet just began to come up when I was in my teens. I also got my HAM-Radio license in my teens primarely to do packet radio since I was interested in computernetworks. Since dialup internet was so expensive this was the best next thing for me. When I went to college I had no problem understanding how layer 1 and layer 2 networks work because I had seen all the AX25 packets scrolling by in the monitor window in my packet terminal, and in the end I finished up as a computernetwork engineer. Most of my dayjob is still about big corporate lan networks, connected by vpn tunnels and being natted to a few public ips. But I want to experiment with more. I want to experiment with the internet with public IPs, see what happens, I want to experiment with BGP, transit and peering. And I have found a group of HAMs who share my passion and we have build a big wireless network as our playground, based on commercial wifi equipment. All of these HAMs also love other disciplines in the variety of HAM radio. Like the OM who does most of the wifi setups and alignments used to be a fervent ATV contester on the microwave bands. So he has the gear and knowledge to measure and do things with wifi antenna's I have no clue about. And I learn from him. On the other hand I am fluent in debugging computernetworks. And they learn from me. And everyone who is working on our network has his own passions in the ham radio community that they can apply to other parts of ham radio and learn from eachother. And in the end, what is more beautiful about HAM-Radio then sharing a hobby, learning from eachothers subdisciplines within hamradio, working as a team, learning who they are, and also learning who you yourself are ? This is my eyes the Ham spirit. 44net makes this possible for hams interested in TCP/IP (and udp, icmp, and so on ofcourse :)) We have it. Lets use it. But leave everyone free to use it as they see fit. If you want to route it to the public internet via BGP, go ahead. If you want to close it off so only other 44net users can use it, thats fine too. If you like another way of connecting all the subnets together instead of the ipip & gateway list system, build it, propose it, show it, experiment, work together with other people. That is the ham-spirit. Foe example, the 44.144 subnet is internally connected by wifi links and internal openvpn links, and we then announce the entire subnet to the public internet and to the amprnet ipip tunnel network via a gateway. Nobody is saying you need to use ipip inside your own segment if you don't like it. Thats the beauty about ham radio and 44net, you can experiment, and if it breaks, it doesn't matter, when you get it fixed again, you will have learned a few new things and understand why it broke in the first place. There is no point in "returning" this legacy space to ARIN. They are not handing out IPv4 space anymore as it is officially depleted. The only way to get IPv4 space is to buy it from other people who have excess IPv4 space. I hope we will never sell 44net ip space, since we will never be able to get something like this back. This is the same as saying we should return all the allocated HAM Radio frequencies so they can be used for commercial purposes. the allocated 44 subnet is just as big a part of ham radio as the allocated frequencies are for our use and experiments. Just my thoughts. - Robbie ON4SAX