Re: [44net] Time to restructure the network?

As long as it doesn’t create failure points! This event is the perfect example. The entire worldwide 44.x community didn't even know there was a problem for about 8 hours! And, once reported, everyone was more interesting in griping about the address sale than fixing the DNS problem. In fact, no one even knew how to/who could fix the problem because the 44.in-addr.arpa server is handled by a very select few (one?). The IPIP mesh may be non-standard, but it is distributed, without any single point of failure. To get between two points, the two gateways have to have IP connectivity to each other. That's it. The two end-points can troubleshoot directly. But every proposal I've seen on this list involves adding at least two other ham points of failure. For example, I would presumably connect to some other ham's BGP node and the other end of the connection would do the same. Why? Do these hubs have 24x7 support, like my ISP does? Do the responsible people ever go to work, go out to eat, get sick, go on vacation, ...? Are they going to be available to troubleshoot on my schedule? What if they just don't feel like it today? The six gateway machines in our network don't even use the single-point-of-failure 44-style RIP server. We download the gateway/route list every 6 hours (suitable for our needs). If FTP fails, file doesn't exist, file has zero size, number of changes seems unreasonable, etc., (all of which have happened over the years), we send an alert to our folks and continue on with the previous list of routes and try again later. As a result, since 2009, we have had exactly zero outages! So: Standard protocols? Absolutely! If it doesn't add failure points between peers/gateways, I'm for it! As you say, we'll need some reliable way to distribute the peer info. Perhaps a few mirrored servers spread around the world, enabling us to try another one if our closest server fails. But for peer info, not for forwarding. Requiring some artificial overlay routing hierarchy or forwarding hop between end-points smells like taking a step back to the 80s and hop-by-hop BBS forwarding. Michael, N6MEF