I am trying to learn how ipip routing works by studying the various setup scripts and wiki pages. Now I came upon a FAQ answer in https://wiki.ampr.org/wiki/FAQ which I do not quite understand:
" Can I just route all 44net traffic via a single tunnel?
No. The main AMPRNET gateway does not provide this functionality - you must have a tunnel to each system you wish to contact. "
Does this mean that I will need to create that many tunnel devices or will a single device be able to handle all the required multiple tunnels?
That depends on your device. A plain Linux system will not require multiple tunnel devices because on device tunl0 it can use the routing table to define the endpoints for all the different destinations. So you don't set a tunnel endpoint on the device, it is set in the routing table. And the routing table preferably is maintained by a program that processes the AMPR RIP packets.
However, when you have some other router, like Cisco or MikroTik, this mode is often not offered and you *do* require a separate tunnel device for each destination (currently about 600...)
It is all a bit outdated. I hope the community sometime soon decides to migrate to a somewhat more modern setup that does not mandate a full mesh tunnel network when users do not desire to have it. (i.e. establish a number of routers in datacenters around the world so one can connect to one or a few routers instead of to all individual end users, many of whom are not even operational)
Rob