24 Jul
2019
24 Jul
'19
4:39 a.m.
On 23/07/19 03:42, Rob Janssen via 44Net wrote:
But NONE of those volunteers were from the
Netherlands!! (they did
not need to
be, because I already host such a proxy farm in the Netherlands and
the call for
volunteers was to get more of them running across the world)
The spread of volunteers was not as good as it could have been, but
there were
several from California, from Canada, from Australia, etc.
Probably there are not so affected by backward internet connectivity
(or lack
of money) as you are. I don't know if they end up spending the
$5/month for
the benefit of amateur radio or if they got their hosting for free as
part of
some other deal. But they do offer the service! Voluntarily, without
complaining.
I'm one of those volunteers. In my case, I was already paying for the
VPS to provide IRLP/Echolink services. Adding a bunch of proxies was a
no brainer, and required no additional outlay. I found an additional
benefit. Shortly after I got the additional IPs up, my ISP was forced
to renumber my commercial subnet. I simply transferred remaining
services to 44net IPs, and only took a single commercial IP.
I was left with one last problem - the route between hosts here with
44net IPs (IPIP tunnelled) and the VPS (direct BGP routed) goes via UCSD
by default, which is almost unusable. As I've been playing with
ZeroTier lately, I used it to create a more direct route between my two
subnets, which did the trick.
Maybe you are mostly stuck in the usage scenario where
AMPRnet is
mostly used to
emulate the old packet radio system, e.g. for BBS forwarding, DX
cluster, telnet
chat, etc. However, most new users who already know the internet want
to do
other things, like WebSDR, audio and video streaming (e.g. to
YouTube), running
amateur-oriented web services like a Mattermost server, etc.
Internet connectivity is a must for most of these.
Here in Australia, the issue of
Internet connectivity is a vexed one.
Obviously for use cases like my Echolink proxies, my 44net addresses are
simply public IP addresses, and there's no ham radio implications. That
all changes once I put IPs to RF. Then direct Internet access becomes
problematic, though using the Internet as an intermediate connecting
medium is obviously not an issue.
But running amateur related services internal to the network will
require good latency and jitter performance for realtime audio applications.
But you can at least try! I remember seeing the
questions here about
having an
IPIP gateway with more than one external address (e.g. using two
different ISP
links) to have redundancy at that level. Not possible, Sir! An IPIP
tunnel
endpoint has no way of seeing that the other side is down.
With the newly proposed system this function would be no problem. BGP
sees
that a link is down and switches over to the alternate. Even within a
second,
when you configure BFD with it.
But as long as the IPIP advocates get it their way, this will not happen.
I'm
not wedded to IPIP, but I would prefer whatever technology we use
uses direct point to point links where possible, and low(ish) latency
intermediate links where necessary. Certainly some sort of dynamic
routing would be advantageous. However, whatever routing technology we
use will need to be capable of running under some fairly complex network
environments. For example, I have around 6 different networks on the
same wire here. But provided these cases are taken into account, I'm
all for a dynamically routed solution. It allows for more fallback
options.
--
73 de Tony VK3JED/VK3IRL
http://vkradio.com