16 May
2021
16 May
'21
12:31 p.m.
On 5/16/21 6:01 PM, Antonios Chariton (daknob) via 44Net wrote:
I think that focusing on IPv6 and IPv6-only networks
is the right path forward, and if you see the IPv6 map of the blog post, we are giving out
IP space “wastefully” and we still haven’t even allocated a /10 out of the /0 (or more
accurately the unicast /3). I would really like to see more and better IPv6 support in
modern tools, especially in ham radio, with the goal of having them work fine in an
IPv6-only environment (even with NAT64). Maybe people want to work on OSS software and
improve its IPv6 situation and apply for grants from ARDC to do so? I don’t speak for the
GAC/TAC/Board but personally I think it would be a good idea that could benefit the entire
Internet.
Antonis
Antonios,
Why would there be any urgency for amprnet to move to IPv6?
We have an IPv4 allocation, currently about 0.33% of the total available IPv4 space, and
as you have researched we are by far not using all of it.
There appears to be no urgency to move to IPv6, to get a much larger space, and use even
less of it.
As long as there is no explosive growth of the number of used addresses (and I don't
see a reason why there would be such a sudden growth), it looks like IPv4 is going to
serve us well for a very long time!
The situation with fragmented IPv4 allocation to users in the internet is what it is, and
we as radio amateurs are not going to change that.
And of course I do see the advantage of IPv6 on the internet, just do not see it why we as
radio amateurs would be in the same boat.
Sure it would be nice to experiment with IPv6, and we have discussed that on this list,
and there appears to be some agreement on how we could best do that (i.e. not by applying
for some contiguous IPv6 space for radio amateurs, as we did with IPv4), but as it is now
a blocker is that the mostly used router in our network (MikroTik) is not capable of
running a split network for internet and hamnet (policy routing).
For now I am waiting for RouterOS v7 to become sufficiently stable to deploy it in our
network. Which could easily take one or two more years at the pace it is currently being
developed...
Then I plan to route an IPv6 /48 obtained from the ISP into the network with a 1:1 mapping
of each assigned IPv4 address in 44.137.0.0/16 to an IPv6 /64.
And hopefully by then we have a new backbone network where we can use private BGP peerings
to exchange a list of IPv6 nets assigned to radio amateurs worldwide, so we can use that
to setup some filtering of "friend or foe", just like we now filter on
"44-net or not".
By the way, I am not a fan of "researchers scanning the network". We have a
continuous data flow of 2 Mbit/s on our external gateway from self-appointed researchers.
That is why there are automatic blocks for researchers who clearly do not know about the
structure of our network.
Whenever a scan is done from internet to addresses in a /26 range that does not contain
any hosts (as registered in DNS), the "researcher" is automatically blocked for
some time. There are usually about 60000-80000 entries in that list. So you are not
alone!
However, we do track the usage of our address space ourselves. E.g. here you can see what
addresses are actively sending traffic at least past one of the two routers of the gateway
(i.e. towards internet or between internet tunnels that terminate at our router):
http://gw-44-137.ampr.org/cgi-bin/ipaddrs
There also is a view of the route table here: http://gw-44-137.ampr.org/cgi-bin/nlroutes
And of course there is the list of allocated addresses (registered in DNS, not necessarily
active) here: http://gw-44-137.ampr.org/hosts/
This is live information for which you do not have to scan.
About Echolink: there no need for Echolink to use an entire /24, but to run an Echolink
proxy you need one address per proxy, and one proxy can serve only a single user.
I wrote software that facilitates the running of proxy farms (unlike the software from
echolink.org which runs a single proxy only) and the use of a /24 network is just a
convenient subnet size to run a reasonable number of proxies on a single site. So a
couple of sites worldwide have chosen to deploy proxies in a /24 network.
While it is unfortunate that the protocol was designed in this way, I do not see the use
of a /24 out of our allocated /16 (or a couple of /24 out of the total /9+/10) for a
purpose that serves amateur radio as "a waste". We can choose between leaving
it unallocated or doing something useful for amateur radio with it, and I prefer the
latter. Should we ever run out of space in our /16 I can always opt to stop the proxy
service and use the subnet for something else. But I don't think that will happen.
Rob