Re: [44net] What is 44net?

You are making a big leap here. Nobody is going to tell you who you are going to have for neighbors or up stream. Find someone you trust, that has the contingency plan you feel comfortable with and connect to them. They don't even have to be in your neighborhood. N6MEF: Then I choose nothing. Currently, when my packets leave my gateway, they travel through commercial carrier networks to reach the destination gateway. Those carriers have service level agreements, redundancy, diversity, 24x7 NOCs, 24x7 technicians, caches of spare equipment, help desks, etc. Your proposal would cause my traffic to ride some of those same carrier networks but then exit to some amateur near me who has none of those capabilities, then back onto the commercial networks, then back off to some other amateur near my destination, then back onto the commercial carrier to the destination. Do you really not see how silly that is? When a problem happens, either one or both of those amateurs may be at work, asleep, away on vacation, out to dinner, away on a business trip, or just not interesting in working on it at the time because he's watching the Star Trek marathon that weekend. Then there's always, "sorry guys, I'm being transferred for work, so I'm going to have to shut down my system." That's a huge step backward in reliability. I mean, seriously, why would anyone choose to add amateur operations into the middle of the existing all commercial/professional forwarding path that our full mesh of tunnels currently traverses? N6MEF: One of the nice things about AMPRnet over the old BBS network is we don't need to rely on each amateur in the path keeping their system running and configured properly. Anyone with experience in both will tell you there is simply no comparison. The old-style reliance on amateurs in the forwarding path is far, far less reliable. You would have us go backwards to that approach. Any plan will have the potential for failures. You might control your IPIP tunnel but what if your ISP goes away? Is the device that is running your tunnel on redundant power? Does it have redundant networking with failover and portability of your encapsulating IP address? Does very end point you want to talk to have those capabilities? N6MEF: Strawman arguments, all. If my ISP goes away, so would my connection to any local BGP hub in your plan. Or, if the remote endpoint dies, so does connectivity to that location, both in the existing mesh and in your plan. So let's not play games. Pointing out existing failure modes does nothing to mask the fact that your proposal has the same failure modes, plus it would add a pile of new ones. N6MEF: Bottom line, you plan introduces new/additional failure modes which have been pointed out by several people on this list and you've done nothing but dismiss them. I doubt anyone will want their traffic to have to traverse the facilities managed by someone with such a lack of appreciation for the problems that can occur and so little regard for their desire/need for stability and reliability. At my day job, every dollar that comes into our company arrives on an RJ-45, and it falls into my area of responsibility to make sure it stays up and we have failover and contingency plans. I understand these things. (I use geographically dispersed data centers, multiple carriers, redundant servers, etc. but there is still the potential to go down, at least temporarily, even even with service level agreements.) N6MEF: Got it. As I suspected, not a commercial/carrier network architect/engineer. Carrier network operations is an entirely different set of issues. Still, I'll bet your company doesn't rely on an amateur, with no service level agreement, no NOC, no backup staff, no 24x7 operations to manage connectivity between your data centers. I also understand that ham radio is a hobby.. N6MEF: Yes, amateur RADIO is a hobby. So knock yourself out experimenting with radio. But the last thing any of us needs is to have some amateur insert himself into the commercial networking path between gateways. Michael N6MEF