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.