On Mon, 2 Aug 2021 13:29:33 -0700, Rosy Wolfe rosy@ardc.net wrote:
With this in mind, what problems with the AMPRnet do you think we should be trying to solve first?
I've been subscribed to the list for a while, but I'm not currently an AMPRnet user. (I have been a ham for over 40 years, and I did run TCP/IP over AX.25 back in the nineties.) My background is in software development, not networking, so while I know about building high-volume web services, and I'd guess I know quite a bit more about networking than the average ham, much of the networking discussion here is well over my head.
After trying to follow the discussion, I welcome the board and Rosy's attempt to reset things a bit, but I wonder if instead of asking "What problems with the AMPRnet do you think we should be trying to solve first?," we should first ask and try to answer "What is AMPRnet for?" The TAC document discusses reserving address space for non-Internet-connected "amateur radio-based networks," along with other uses. But as I understand it, some people here don't think that AMPRnet addresses should be reserved for things that will never be part of the Internet.
I'd like to see a clear definition of what hams are using AMPRnet addresses for now and what they would like to be able to do in the future. In software development we talk about "use cases." According to Wikipedia: "A use case is a list of actions or event steps typically defining the interactions between a role (known in the Unified Modeling Language (UML) as an actor) and a system to achieve a goal."[1] An actor might be an individual ham, a network administrator, or someone else. I wonder if trying to describe how AMPRnet is being used today, what is easy and what is too difficult and what we would like to enable in the future would help to provide a basis for discussion.
If there were consensus on which use cases are most valuable, which are too hard to accomplish today and similar questions, then we would have a better basis to evaluate proposals with respect to how well they solve the important problems, how difficult or disruptive they are to implement and so forth.
Jim N1ADJ
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Jim Ancona