[Goat] routing

[William Waites]

On Sun, Apr 25, 2004 at 02:59:06PM -0400, Benoit Grégoire wrote:
> 
> http://www.freenetworks.org/moin/index.cgi/NetworkAddressAllocations

better than wiana in my opinion, but rfc1918 addresses
mostly, that will collide with what people are presently
using and will cause headaches. i'm not a fan of this
approach.

> >    c. it is possible to be allocated ipv4 blocks
	  [...]
> >       ii. these addresses are scarce and expensive
> >          to obtain.
> 
> That's unrealistic for a free network.

another thing just came to mind. there is a /8 dedicated
to amateur radio. montreal is allocated 44.135.0.0/16 if
memory serves correctly. and it has mostly fallen into
disuse.

but using this range means that we'd need to pay attention
to the amateur radio rules, and i am not certain how they
work with respect to using addresses.

using amateur radio frequencies would not be appropriate
because 3rd party communication is restricted and encryption
is outlawed. but using amateur radio addresses in unlicensed
spectrum might be allowed.

> I have to admit RFC3056 is quite tempting, but we can't
> just get rid of ipv4 entirely for now.
>
> [...]
> 
> Indeed, it would be interesting to run an ipv6 and an ipv4
> network on the mesh  in paralel, especially since part of
> it's purpose is to be a research  network. How hard that
> would be in practice I don't know.  

i think it should be a design goal. there's nothing harder
or easier about ipv6 vs. ipv4 except for the fact that many
devices speak ipv4 only by default. and of course the v6
implementations have been designed to operate well in parallel
as a transition mechanism.

i'm inclined to consider the ipv4 side of the mesh as an
icky quagmire that's going to be difficult to sort out in
a consistent way that preserves simplicity and elegance
and makes everyone happy. 

> All that requires central planning and administration
> and heavyweight software  to run on each nodes that will
> be very hard to fit in an embeeded platform on top of
> an antenna mast.

the preferred design would be to just stick an ethernet to
radio bridge on the mast, and have the heavyweight software
run on a computer indoors. but that might not be practical
in all situations.
 
> But most importantly, the network won't
> be Free, as it will require explicit application level
> proxying to run ipv4 services.
>
> [...]
>
> That won't do, it doesn't allow clients to use ipv4
> software over the mesh.  Remember, the primary purpose
> of the mesh is to communicate with other mesh  nodes,
> not to get traffic out of the mesh (even if that is one
> possible application)

the idea would be to encourage people to use v6 -- we 
would be just a little bit ahead of the curve. true,
people running windows would need to apply a patch and
that's "hard", but maybe the next version of windows 
won't need the patch.

i still favour a free v6 network with some backwards
compatibility bits tacked on for v4 only devices. no
matter what we do the v4 part is going to be kludgy.

but, you've convinced me that application-layer proxies
are not the way to go. and for similar reasons nats
are not the way to go. so i still don't know where
we're going to get our v4 adresses from... v6 is
so much easier ;)

/w
-- 
The study of non-linear physics is like the study of non-elephant
biology.

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