[MLB-WIRELESS] routing

Jeremy Lunn jeremy at austux.net
Sun Jan 27 22:40:57 EST 2002


I'm only new to this list so sorry if this has been discussed recently.
I was looking at this RFC though and it makes no mention of how routing
would be handled:
http://melbwireless.dyndns.org/wiki/?RFC

It would not be a good idea to use static routing because a network like
this is likely to have nodes that are:
a) unreliable
b) subject to localised power failures
c) have a tree growing in the path of one or more of it's links
and various other things and 11Mbps doesn't go far when it's shared by
dozens of people doing large file transfers.

BGP would provide redundancy but AFAIK it doesn't provide load balancing
so it would probably be best to use something like OSPF.  Each node
should have connectivity to at least several other nodes but I imagine
this would be pretty expensive to achieve at the moment.  And there's
also the issue of mobile connectivity but IIRC 802.11b has stuff to do
with roaming but I can't remember how it goes for using that on a large
IP based network.  Perhaps the best solution would be to obtain a
dynamic IP address from the current access point and tunnel a static one
if need be?

Security is another issue.  Despite being a public network it would be
undesirable to have people using it who can't be traced.  And being able
to identify certain peers is a good thing.  A PGP/GPG keyring would be a
good idea and perhaps a certificate authority.  But how legal is it to
use encryption over a network like this?  I recall someone saying that
your not allowed to use encryption over CB or Amateur radio frequencies
or something?

Now if only I could afford to buy some hardware! That will do from me
for now :)

-- 
Jeremy Lunn
Melbourne, Australia
http://www.jabber.org/ - the next generation of Instant Messaging.

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