Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net [LWN.net]

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 8, 2011 20:34 UTC (Tue) by fuhchee (guest, #40059)
In reply to: Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net by maniax
Parent article: Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

"is there any protocol or any study that shows it's possible to have such a mesh network with more than a 1000 nodes?"

Perhaps you'd consider UUCP or BGP routing as a positive example.

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Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 8, 2011 20:59 UTC (Tue) by maniax (subscriber, #4509) [Link] (3 responses)

UUCP is a hierarchical network (people configure a few paths to neighbors and they take care of the rest of the delivery), and BGP also requires pretty specific configuration and setup. Here we're talking about a single broadcast domain that automagically configures its paths and takes routing decisions.

There are such protocols (like BATMAN) that can create such mesh networks, but they still fall short of that many nodes. Not to mention the whole hell of assigning IP addresses (it would work with v6 and SLAAC, but ipv4/rendezvous and the similar things will be a problem), level of trust for neighbors, etc., etc. In the end what we would need is BGP's policy routing with zero need for configuration and convergence times that are less than a minute, which might be just too hard to do.

(and there's a reason I say this has to be automatic, just think of a bunch of average users doing policy routing and the resulting mess)

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 8, 2011 21:26 UTC (Tue) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] (2 responses)

UUCP is a hierarchical network (people configure a few paths to neighbors and they take care of the rest of the delivery)

It was worse than that, the sender had to specify the full path. In the mid-80s you had to know the topology of the UUCP network to send mail. This was later automated, so you could send mail to enduser@utzoo.uucp instead of oliveb!ihnp4!decvax!utzoo!enduser, but this required your local machine to have a copy of the connection map so it could compute the path. Many people chose very bad paths, because they replied to Usenet postings and sent their mail back along the circuitous delivery route (requiring, say, 10 hops instead of 4).

As it got easier to get on the real Internet, sites with only UUCP connectivity could get MX records for mail delivery from the Internet with normal domainized email addresses instead of the fake UUCP domain, and they only needed a path to a "smart host" to get their mail sent.

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 8, 2011 21:29 UTC (Tue) by fuhchee (guest, #40059) [Link]

I was referring to the automated uumaps-based routing. While 25 years ago, not many uucp hosts could undertake to compute the full routing table, machines now are somewhat faster.

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 8, 2011 21:32 UTC (Tue) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

But maybe you're thinking of Usenet and not UUCP, which used a flooding algorithm and recorded paths. When two machines connected, each would offer the other a set of messages, by message ID, excluding any that had the other machine's name in the delivery path. The delivery path could be used to trace not only the origin of the message but also who's connected to whom.

Usenet had a "cancel" control message, allowing any user to delete a message. It was completely insecure, but it was the only thing that kept Usenet alive once the spammers discovered it. If cancels were made cryptographically secure, there would need to be some mechanism to control spam or vandalism.

FIDONet is even better example

Posted Feb 9, 2011 7:49 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

FIDONet is better example, it's a network with very little hierarchy and possibility of direct communication between ALL nodes if necessary.

As for full mesh networks, it seems that they are not possible technically for large uses.