On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 3:03 PM, Eric Fort eric.fort@gmail.com wrote:
(Please trim inclusions from previous messages) _______________________________________________ It would seem to me that while due to the fact we are tunneling most everything we may have a logical full mesh but far from a physical full mesh. What does a tunneled logical full mesh really accomplish for us other than making things all the more complicated?
Right now it allows small/medium sized islands of amateur packet radio networks to interconnect with others around the planet at speeds faster and more reliable than HF or VHF.
Wouldn't traditional peering and routing done "the normal way" be much easier?
Not really because most networks are point to point (ie: you connect to your work VPN - not you connect to your work VPN which interconnects with every other VPN in the world). This essentially is a hack to backbone a semi-private network on top of the public internet.
I can see a valid place for nailing up vpn links and various tunnels, i.e. last mile access and tying islands together though something other than IPIP with links negotiated on a peering basis as needed, but what does a full logical mesh of tunnels give us? It seems that since it's built of tunnels and thus virtual rather than physical we just unnecessarily complicate the mess wherein the tunneled traffic and the tunnels themselves end up taking multiple and somewhat changing hops to get from one end to another.
Yup, nothing's perfect.
IP was designed such that I could hand a packet off and basically go, "ok, now it's your problem to deliver it (on a best effort basis)", thus I shouldn't need to know every conceivable route to every conceivable endpoint. What prevents us from using it that way?
Because the internet isn't built that way. You still need a source and destination address. You still need routers able to figure out how to get your packet from point A to point Z via points B,C,Q and V. And your packets need to know how to return back to you through said points. The way the current network works is that it sends a routing table to all participants of all these little islands of "44net" and how they could be reached over the public internet. And mind you, for it to work correctly, the traffic has to be effectively routable back to you without being dropped into a blackhole or routing loops occurring. One can just substitute 44/8 for 10/8 and the same problems are there.
The simplest way of routing a non-routable network is through encapsulation for which IPIP was chosen as it's part of the TCP/IP network protocol. This allows everyone to be part of the network while not having control or bandwidth being focused at any one single location.
A significantly harder solution would be to use BGP which is what is used on the larger internet. But there are many, many reasons why you don't want just anyone manipulating BGP routes. One wrong command and you could send China's internet traffic to Togo. Or create routing loops which would cause large interruptions not only for yourself but for a multitude of other people on the internet.
Most residential ISP's will not let you insert 44/8 addresses onto their networks. Even commercial hosting and colocation providers really want to see justification and the proper I's and T's dotted and crossed before they will host a 44/8 subnet for you as it's still not a trivial change. Then there is the problem of encapsulated and non-encapsulated. The few 44/8 subnets that have broken off the UCSD router are able to route across the internet just like anyone else but cannot reach other 44net islands that run the encapsulated tunnels without going back to the encap munge because those other islands either don't know how or are unable to reach them due to upstream providers blackholing 44/8 traffic as nonroutable.
One might suggest that we can just create a 44net VPN that we all connect into via PPTP or other means but who pays the hosting bill for that? Bandwidth and hosting still costs money at the end of the day as Netflix found out. And we don't have the advantage of doing commercial "peering" as our networks cannot be used for commercial purposes.
That's all I got...