Subject: IPv6, interNAT, Wi-Fi (not mobile)

From: S Woodside <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2003 17:50:32 -0500

Speaking of that ... I've been active in the community networking 
community for a little while and I've started to interest myself in 
mesh and/or ad-hoc wireless situations. (note that I'm specifically not 
interested in mobility). The application I'm interested in particularly 
is using WiFi to bring internet broadband to areas where it's not 
accessible currently. That could be either last-mile areas or rural 
areas. The concept of setting up a "mesh" network (surely an overloaded 
term if there is one ...) in the wifi community maps roughly speaking 
to "fixed ad-hoc wireless" in the research community, AFAICT.

With that in mind, there is currently only one publicly available, 
deployed "mesh" solution called Locustworld MeshAP, that uses private 
IPv4 subnets like 10.0.x.x and 192.168.x.x for all of the meshed access 
points and something called "WIANA" <http://wiana.org> to manage the 
nodes. Not very scaleable or friendly IMHO. Other private or community 
WLANs are mostly hand-configured ... there's another one by Seattle 
Wireless that I haven't looked closely at yet.

In addition I recently had to cope with the hassles of setting up an 
H.323 connection (with ohphoneX) from behind a firewall at both ends 
and immediately concluded that people on any kind of wireless mesh that 
uses NAT are going to be severely limited since they aren't truly a 
part of the internet.

So I would like to request discussion on this subject. I have a lot 
more to say about it but maybe I'll stop here for now ;-)

simon

On Tuesday, March 25, 2003, at 05:10  PM, Lloyd Wood wrote:

> InterNAT
--
www.simonwoodside.com -- 99% Devil, 1% Angel

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From: John Stracke <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2003 18:03:51 -0500

S Woodside wrote:

> and immediately concluded that people on any kind of wireless mesh 
> that uses NAT are going to be severely limited since they aren't truly 
> a part of the internet.

Right.  The problem is that what I've seen in the past is that 
wireless-mesh proponents want to be able to do massive multihoming, with 
all participants with external links sharing those links, and all the 
traffic from the outside finding the shortest way in.  I won't say it's 
impossible, but last I heard nobody knew how to do it; the route flap 
would be horrible.

-- 
/============================================================\
|John Stracke      [email-masked]                     |
|Principal Engineer|http://www.centive.com                   |
|Centive           |My opinions are my own.                  |
|============================================================|
|"God does not play games with His loyal servants." "Whoo-ee,|
|where have you *been*?" --_Good Omens_                      |
\============================================================/

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From: S Woodside <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2003 14:59:42 -0500

On Tuesday, March 25, 2003, at 06:03  PM, John Stracke wrote:

>> that uses NAT are going to be severely limited since they aren't 
>> truly a part of the internet.
>
> wireless-mesh proponents want to be able to do massive multihoming, 
> with all participants with external links sharing those links, and all 
> the traffic from the outside finding the shortest way in.  I won't say 
> it's impossible, but last I heard nobody knew how to do it; the route 
> flap would be horrible.

This is in fact one of the major goals, although I've never heard the 
community wireless networking (CWN) folks express it so precisely. The 
ability to be able to set up a wireless network and route internet 
traffic through the mesh is strongly desired. I think that beyond that, 
it is also desirable as well.

Perhaps it is difficult but if solved and implemented it will allow 
these types of networks to be a part of the internet, not just "on" the 
internet ... creating a type of viral internet, in some sense, where 
any new node becomes a beachhead for propagation of the internet into 
new geographical areas.

I understand that it's difficult, but it's also important. In addition, 
there is a strong demand for last-mile/rural broadband around the 
world. People are kludging together solutions that aren't scalable, 
and/or are fragile, and/or are proprietary (e.g. RoamAd, etc. and a lot 
of these so called "solutions" are really just vaporware right now).

simon

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From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2003 12:16:27 -0800

At 05:50 PM 3/25/2003 -0500, S Woodside wrote:
>In addition I recently had to cope with the hassles of setting up an H.323 
>connection (with ohphoneX) from behind a firewall at both ends and 
>immediately concluded that people on any kind of wireless mesh that uses 
>NAT are going to be severely limited since they aren't truly a part of the 
>internet.

You are experiencing some of the issues of NATs. They work reasonably well 
in confined environments where the only thing behind them is a client with 
an external server. Putting the server behind the NAT, or a p2p 
application's peer, requires some magic in the firewall - eminently doable, 
but inflexible if it is managed by an IT organization other than you, and 
not the kind of thing a typical consumer wants to know anything about.

This is one of the best arguments for a global address space that doesn't 
require a life-support system (e.g. NAT) to maintain it, IMHO.

As to the massive multihoming issues that Strack comments on, and your 
reply, there are a set of considerations. If you want the network to have 
transit properties - if you want traffic from provider A to go to provider 
B across your network - you are offering the providers a transit service, 
and you might want to discuss with them what they might want to use it for. 
I suspect that the scaling and error properties of a wi-fi network will 
give them pause. If you want the network to multi-home to a variety of 
providers, it is not a transit network, it is an access network, which IMHO 
is a very reasonable way to use this kind of network.

Using it as ad hoc, I think you want to not relay route flaps to your 
providers. Rather, you want to advertise your prefix (however obtained) to 
them en mass, and handle the routing issues internally. This may mean 
providing wired connectivity between your various points of attachment to 
your providers, to mask the internal motion.

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From: John Stracke <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2003 15:02:40 -0500

S Woodside wrote:

>> proponents want to be able to do massive multihoming, with all 
>> participants with external links sharing those links, and all the 
>> traffic from the outside finding the shortest way in.  I won't say 
> I understand that it's difficult, but it's also important.

Well, yeah.  If you could solve it, the solution would be applicable to 
all networks, and would substantially improve the stability of the 
Internet.  So obviously lots of people (not me; I'm not a routing 
expert) have thought about it; the fact that it hasn't been solved yet 
should discourage you from making plans that assume it will be solved.

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From: shogunx <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Jul 2010 21:15:31 -0400 (EDT)

> any new node becomes a beachhead for propagation of the internet into

precisely... it spreads in a horizontal fashion.

> of these so called "solutions" are really just vaporware right now).

sleekfreak pirate broadcast
world tour 2002-3
live from los angeles
http://sleekfreak.ath.cx

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From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 10:30:17 +0100

Tastes much like a MANET network to me.

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From: John Stracke <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2003 15:43:21 -0500

Fred Baker wrote:

> providers. Rather, you want to advertise your prefix (however 
> obtained) to them en mass, and handle the routing issues internally. 
> This may mean providing wired connectivity between your various points 
> of attachment to your providers, to mask the internal motion.

Or, failing that, some more firmly nailed-up wireless connectivity.  If 
you can get line-of-sight between your attachment points, then two 
high-gain antennas and two UPSes would be cheaper than most wired 
connections, and probably almost as reliable.

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From: John Stracke <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 11:13:15 -0500

> Tastes much like a MANET network to me. 

Well, yes.  Internally, that's fine; and a MANET community wireless 
network is a great idea.  It's just that, externally, you don't want 
that ad hoc network exposing its internal structure, or its routing 
updates will be horrific.  A solution to that would probably be a 
solution to the general problem of route flap.

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From: John Stracke <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 11:13:15 -0500

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From: S Woodside <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 19:58:24 -0500

> solution to the general problem of route flap.

So to turn that around, where to look for analysis of the general 
analysis of route flap. Also, this is a strong motivation to solve that 
problem in a more robust manner, because otherwise, the CWN folks may 
be building an alternate inefficient layer over IP.

simon