Hi,
Le 17/02/2016 13:48, Bryan Fields a écrit :
If you have a network built out or plans with a few other TK hams on the island, there is really no need for a subnet. It's an IP, not a national identity:)
We are in the radio-amateur world. There's no *need* at all for building such a network, HI ;-) It's for fun, technical experiment and learning purposes, nothing else.
What we want to build, is an island-wide IP network, with peerings with our neighbours in the Mediterranean sea (France, Italy, Sardinia). Each of our current locations (repeaters, contest sites, radio-clubs) will be connected. The backbone and servers will be hosted on virtual machines in two datacenters for redundancy. My company will offer free hosting and unlimited VMs to the HAM community.
I'm a systems/network engineer, I build and maintain networks everyday for my business. My friend TK5EP is a well-known DX and contest operator, and a highly skilled radio engineer. We both have skills, equipment, and energy to do that :-)
Our first design, and our first bricks of the network, are using 10.0.0.0/8 private range. Each physical site has a 10.x.y.0/24 subnet, even if there are only a few address used, because a /24 netmask is easy to understand for beginners. We have an IP-IP gateway in the French range (44.151.20.1), and we planned to have another gateway in the second French range (44.168.20.x). Doing so, we can handle our own network, we can do exactly what we want, without asking anything to anybody.
Anyway, this complicates exchange, both with other HAM networks (amprnet and European Hamnet), but also with Internet : we have to use NAT and reverse-NAT extensively. That's not a problem for me, because I used to do that in my job. Anyway, NAT complicates the job, and makes things more difficult to understand and to maintain. NAT is very useful, but I'd like to use it only when it's required. And I'd prefer to avoid it whenever possible.
Taking that into consideration, I'm wondering if using a "flat" network, with individual 44.x addressing for all sites, no more 10.0.0.0 addressing, and no more NAT, would be be a better solution. My opinion, on a strictly technical point of view, is YES. That's the reason why I'm asking about the possibility to obtain a decent 44.x subnet. If that breaks the rules and/or bother people, then we'll use internal 10.0.0.0 addressing. No problem.
Moreover, if we can obtain a /24 ou a /20 subnet from ampr.org, I'm asking for a specific subnet (ie, that is not in the French ranges) to illustrate the fact Corsica is a separate DXCC country, and an independant island inside the Europe, with a specific language, history, culture, etc... Of course, using 44.151.20.x/24 (subnet of France), or using 44.111.222.0/24 (any other independant subnet) won't change anything on a technical point of wiew. But it would change a lot for us :-)
About BGP, we're still in the "planning" and "testing" stages for now. I do not use BGP in my job, then I actually do not have BGP capabilities in my datacenters. Anyway, my current plans do include BGP capabilities for our hamnet network, and I already had contacts with my providers. My company should be able to offer BGP capabilities to the Corsican HAM community at a very reduced cost, or no cost at all.
For now, we do not have a "map" of our future network. Several virtual machines are already running in a temporary DC: Linux firewall, IP-IP gateway, ipsec and ovpn gateway, network and radio link supervision (Nagios), web server and mail server. We're now working on VoIP server (asterisk) to interconnect our voice repeaters. D-Star gateway will be the next step, because there's a lot of demand here. We're also finishing the hardware tests and validating our solutions : raspberry pi, UBNT and Debian 8 VMs. Mikrotik evaluation is still on the go. I planned to install a Wordpress WEB server, in a DMZ (accessible both from Internet and HamNet), with a presentation of the network, sites, addressing, webcams, meteo, current status and roadmap, tutorials, etc... But that's not at the top of the ToDo list. I'm an engineer, not a marketing specialist, HI :-)
Once this is done, we'll start cleaning up things, deploying in a "production" environment, before giving access to users.
As you can see, I'm not just requesting a single IP address as an end-user. I really think a /24 (minimum) subnet would be helpful. And an independant subnet would be in the sense of the history ;-)
Thank you in advance, and apologies for being quite long. Usually, my contributions are a little bit more technical, and less esoteric :-)
73 de TK1BI