pete M via 44Net 44net@mailman.ampr.org wrote:
Could there be a way that we can have some block of 16 or 32 address accessible from a simple wireguard link that would be created by a request to the portal?
I agree that our current methods of connecting new hams are pretty klunky and could use some improvement.
We could do as you suggest, but if the wireguard traffic ever was transmitted over ham frequencies, that would make that new ham liable for violating their country's laws against encrypted traffic. "Don't bite the newbies" is a good strategy for growing the community, if we can figure out how to do it.
So we'd want some way to briefly check that there were only commercial or unlicensed comm links between the two ends of the wireguard tunnel. Perhaps if we maintained in the Portal a model of the major ham-radio portions of the 44net, and verified with a traceroute that the wireguard traffic would not (at the moment of creation) cross one of them?
Even 16 addresses is a lot in 2021 -- we should let new hams request 1, 4, or 8 as well. They can upgrade later if they need more. (Yes, I remember the 1990s when my house Ethernet had 256 publicly routed addresses...carved out of the 65,536 addresses that our company got just by asking for them nicely. With my current two ISPs, one offers 8 static addresses and the other only offers one dynamic address.)
John