I've been involved in helping a whole bunch of D-STAR gateways come online and while someone familiar with systems and network administration can work their way through the "rough" spots, often when it comes to that little extra to track down a problem, there is just not the knowledge and/or experience to do so -- so they reach out to others. If we have some reference implementations, and a new border router uses that recipe, then it is much more possible to advise on troubleshooting.

If a widely deployed system is used, then there is a larger community that has discovered and documented special cases, which are often available on the net.

John D. Hays
K7VE

PO Box 1223, Edmonds, WA 98020-1223

On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 14:19, Tim Pozar <pozar@lns.com> wrote:

Great start on the details.

BTW... I wouldn't nail down the hardware to a specific make/model too much. I run a 1+ Gig community network on a pair of OpenBSD routers (in failover via VRRP/HSRP/CARP). I run trunks to it and break it out on common managed switches (ie cisco 2960G). The boxes themselves are two Rackable servers with the hard drives replaced with SSDs.

I think the requirements for the border router could include:

Must:
* Can support at least one full route table.
* Supports 200% of expected bandwidth needs.
Ie. Up and Downstream feeds, PPS, etc.
* Be supported by conditioned and emergency power
* HVAC is also on emergency power
* Physically secure and accessible by the regional coordinator and "Amateur Radio Digital Communications" authorized representatives only.
* (More?)

Should:
* router(s) are multi-homed
* routers have fail-over (hot-spare)

Couldl:
* Enough memory to support large NAT tables (if needed)
* MPLS
* VLANs,
* (More?)

You may have two routers speaking BGP and core and access routers downstream of this. It may all be L3 or it could be L2. Up to the needs of the installation (ie downstream links) and the needs of the community.

Tim