Re: [44net] Echolink proxy/relay hosting

That would be great! You can start getting a /24 (from your country network or from that 44.190 network, that does not really matter when you are not close to another network like Germany) and setup your system to be on the tunnel mesh. Then you can experiment with the software. In parallel you can get your BGP announcement fixed. That is what the whole proxy/relay thing is about. A proxy lives on a system with unlimited UDP access from/to internet (port 5198/5199) and it also listens on port 8100 (default) for TCP connections from a repeater, link or user who is behind NAT. When a user connects it relays the UDP traffic from those ports to the TCP connection, and vice-versa. So it solves the NAT problem for that specific user, while preserving full functionality (the user behind the proxy can connect to several other stations and accept connections from other stations all at the same time). But a proxy can be used only by one user at the same time, that is why you want like 200 proxies. Proxies register themselves at Echolink.org, and a user wanting to use one can retrieve a list from the server and select one, some clients can automatically pick a non-busy proxy from that list. The Echolinks server sorts the list by geolocation distance to the requester, so your own proxies will appear at the top of the list. At least, when you have setup geolocation properly for your subnet. When you carve your subnet out of a country network this will work automatically when your coordinator has properly registered the country network. When he/she hasn't, your subnet will likely appear as located in San Diego, California. But you can fix that by sending a couple of registration requests to the most important geolocation providers, easlily found by googling for IP geolocation. This is another disaddvantage of the 44.190 space: you will certainly have to solve this problem yourself. A relay is a bit different. It allows only limited functionality: only outgoing connections, only a single destination at a time. It is used by default by the phone apps. A relay can serve multiple users at the same time, but the group of users can only connect to different destinations. When a user of a relay wants to connect to a destination (e.g. a popular repeater) that has already been connected by another user, the relay will refuse the connection and the app will have to hop over to another relay to try it there. That is why it is suggested to run 10 relays at each site. Relays are not automatically registered. They need to be manually registered at Echolink, who will put them in a geo DNS so users will get their address when querying relay.echolink.org and being closest to your relay. Try a dig -t a relay.echolink.org to see what it returns for you (most likely it will return our relays at 44.137.75.x in Amsterdam, not really close for you :-) That is what we are trying to solve by getting some more relays deployed. But first you can experiment with proxies, you can turn them on or off at your own will. Once you have started to run relays you need to take care that they remain running or when you want to quit, to tell that to the Echolink people so they can take them out of the pool, so users will not have to try to reach them in vain (until they try one that still works). Rob