Good 'morning',
I am with Bob on this, and for me personally, I have found all of this quite overwhelming since Brian passed, before which ; this all seemed to be in a black box, and suddenly we are now inundated with more BGP use then I ever imagined was going on, and all these technical discussions that although I am capable of understanding, are quite far beyond my practical experiences, and I too am questioning complexities.
It's a lot to take in for just a 'short period of time'.
I like how Rob has summarized the need below if I may put it that way.
a method to facilitate easier connection for those that do not have the luxury of a static IP and incoming IPIP passing through their ISP router.
Agreed.
That is becoming more and more common, and a solution is required not to lock out those that cannot have a suitable internet connection.
Agreed.
So we could do this in a couple of ways for starters.
a) The community steps up and provides services to those they know in need. We're experimenters, that's what we do. For years I 'suffered' not having a static IP, so I can easily relate to not being able to participate.
There are several in the community that have done this for years already, for some at great personal (not so much financial) expense may I add, I wont' list them ...
When I got my static IP, I decided to run an openVPN server (yeah, 12+ years ago) so that several amateur radio guys throughout Canada could get a fixed 44 IP from the rather largely unused allocation given to us for our province (Manitoba).
I was already IPIP 'linked' to UCSD and others, and this worked quite very well. The only potential issue is what are you as a 'provider' willing to absorb as far as costs, how much bandwidth could you handle, and such.
b) Since ARDC seems to have a massive amount of cash, perhaps it can apply for a grant to itself and setup a bunch of openVPN services throughout the planet. I will even manage some of them if you like, allocate a 44 subnet for this openVPN service, so that the once dyndns users who are dying to get a static IP can finally get one. I have NO PROBLEM running this service, if someone in ARDC wants to fund it. There are LINODE systems world wide that could host this. I'm not partial to them, but relatively happy with them.
Even VPS offerings from major providers all over the world no longer
are capable
of participating in the IPIP tunnel mesh directly, as their "control
panel firewall" only
allows TCP and UDP ports to be opened incoming ...
I pay $10 a month to LINODE to host my amprnet playground. I have more or less full amprnet connectivity (IPIP), just requires one special iptables rule to make it work to get to my user space apps.
For 12 years I had a static IP direct to my house, motorola canopy, 6 miles away, but then the trees grew in and I was forced to go DSL, expensive, and no longer static. So for less then the price of running my servers at home, LINODE worked for me, I got my static back and the 'fun' returned.
But when someone wants to do it "the old way", they still can do that.
Of course.
Maiko Langelaar / VE4KLM