My thoughts.

The IPIP / JNOS network is an anachronism that is quant but doesn't take advantage of how technology has evolved. I'm a pretty skilled network guy but the current IPIP tunnel system has eluded me. I have gotten close, but finally thrown my hands up each time. (I never get the rip44d to run and find the proper password.)

However, I can get a VPN tunnel running in short order which can bring an address range to whatever location is on the full Internet. I have a personal class-C at home that has functioned over a VPN for over a year and I have VPN'ed to another Net-44 gateway with success. (In both cases on inexpensive MikroTik routers.)

I think we need to work on connectivity of the gateways to unify Net-44 and treat the "on air" connectivity as a separate task. Whether the on air connectivity is for IP over AX.25 at 1200 bps, WiFi/HSMM, D-STAR Digital Data, or some new transport over RF. It doesn't do a lot of good to have islands of on air activity without interconnectivity of Net-44. Otherwise just use RFC 1918 address space and NAT it to the Internet.

My vision is that we have multiple BGP gateways on the Internet. Some may advertise the whole of 44/8 and others may have smaller networks, clear down to 44.x.x.x/24 Some will be multi-homed, some will not, but all would be advertised to the Internet for routing. Any router advertising all of 44/8 would need to know about all routes for anything with a CIDR of less than /8. I don't think we really want all traffic to go to 1 or 2 routers advertising 44/8 or we're back to the everything must go through UCSD scenario of the last couple of decades.

My recommendation is to find ISPs who are willing to 'donate' bandwidth and routing for some number of BGP'ed networks, then place routers at those ISPs which will support authenticated VPN service to local networks.

Say we had an ISP (or University, etc.) that would donate bandwidth for 44.24.0.0/16 and 44.12.0.0/16,44.26.0.0/16, and 44.40.0.0/16 and BGP advertise those ranges. Let's another data center wanted to BGP 44.24.100.0/24. Traffic would flow to the best gateway for each. If 44.24.10.0/24 didn't have the ability to BGP its own address space, it could VPN to the router at the major gateway (ISP) and that router would tunnel traffic for that network to the gateway for 44.24.10.0/24. Then there might be a small on the air network at 44.24.128.0/28 and its gateway would VPN to the 44.24.10.0/24 router who would route traffic for the small network.

This would mean that no special tables need to be passed around. Each router would know the addresses it was responsible for and would route all other 44 traffic to its "upstream" and non-44 network traffic to the Internet through their service provider.

This means the "heavy lifting" of BGP and network routing would be handled by those ISPs where the expertise exists and a new member of Net-44 could simply setup a simple router that VPN'ed to an upstream router to get its traffic and to send Net-44 traffic, all other traffic would simply pass over local service provider's network.

This is all readily available, off the shelf, technology. For the end user it is very inexpensive to setup a router with VPN. Then the local distribution over RF can happen over whatever technology is available, whether a TNC and FM radio, WiFi dongle, UDR56k-4, Bullet, etc.

________________________________ John D. Hays K7VE PO Box 1223, Edmonds, WA 98020-1223