On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 10:18:35PM -0400, Jim Alles wrote:
The problem is our internet access is through the University, Penn State ( 128.118.0.0/16) and I have not yet found a way around that.
This is precisely the situation that our longstanding method of tunnel gateways is designed to overcome.
You do this by setting up a Linux host that is assigned a single PSU address, probably something that isn't too hard to do. You shouldn't need to have them open any holes in the firewall or ask for special treatment as long as the existing firewall allows IPIP (internet protocol #4) through, which most do because the firewall managers never thought to block it, and also because some VPN schemes used to use it.
The PSU folks don't have to do anything about network 44 routing or BGP or whatever.
You then get a subnet allocation from your regional AMPRNet IP address coordinator and register a gateway for that subnet (via the PSU address) on the portal. Voila', you now have a subnet of AMPRNet routed to your Linux host via IP-IP encapsulation, and through the technique of tunnel gatewaying that Linux host is now connected to the AMPRNet, albeit at a somewhat limited bandwidth.
By making use of the tunnel gateway routing info (either from the static table ("encap file") on the portal or via Rip44d) you will have mesh connectivity to the other tunnel gateways that are working much the same as yours.
You can run JNOS or other software on the Linux host to make it a ham router.
The exact configuration of tunnel interfaces and routing tables varies depending on which distribution of Linux you're using, but people here on the mailing list should be able to describe to you their configurations for whichever Linux you're using. Note that you don't have to use Linux, it's just the most common.
It doesn't take a full-on host system. I'm told that people have used a Raspberry PI box to do this, or you can use OpenWRT or other micro-routers.
If you go this way, it'd be really cool for you to write it up as a wiki article for our wiki.ampr.org site. - Brian