On 31/12/20 7:14 am, Marius Petrescu via 44Net wrote:
I think we discuss about 2 different sides of our network coin.
On one hand we have the end users, which may have very little networking or IT knowledge, and on the other the potential POP sysops.
While on the POP side the implementation and maintainance of the system is done by knowledgeable persons, and so may actually implement whatever interconnection protocols we like (including the existing full mesh IPIP wich is quite fit for the current task except encryption), the user part should be kept as simple and OS agnostic as possible.
And then there's people like me. I'm more than the typical user - I run a rather complex network here, with multiple subnets on the one wire, and even have to policy route at a few points to keep it all going. But I don't (currently) have the WAN knowledge and experience to run a POP that might have to participate using BGP, etc (I've never been hands on with BGP, for example - I just know it exists and have an idea what it does).
I am also likely to need a bunch of addresses, so where do I fit in the grand scheme of things?
That is why I push with the usage of well known protocols on the user side, so that the end user can use basically cheap home routers or even single computers/tablets/phones to achieve 44net connectivity .
Yeah, need to keep things straightforward for the majority of end users.
What happens between POPs is another story, and the sky is the limit.
But a first practical approach is to keep existing IPIP ful mesh between POPs which needs a minimal effort, while moving regular clients to another VPN star topology to increase the accessibility of the network.
I see the topology looking more like a coronavirus, where the core of the network is a "ball" of connectivity, with the end users being on the end of the spikes. :) But within that body, there's redundancy and optimisation of routes.