Albert Homs i Gall | 3 Feb 2012 11:21
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guifi.net internet gateways before Re: med-mesh, a proposal to obtain funding from the EU


Changed the subject since this trhead focus only in guifi.net internet gateways
2012/2/3 Alexander List <alex <at> list.priv.at>
On 02/03/2012 08:25 AM, vortex <at> free2air.net wrote:

 3 ways of getting access:
a-. Inside some mesh clouds direct gateway is obtained trough the routing protocol

Could you explain what that means? Which routing protocol and what do you mean by 'mesh clouds'?

I assume that e.g. OLSR is used as a routing protocol on the air and you announce 0.0.0.0 inside the mesh.

The host announcing 0.0.0.0 then will route and/or NAT to the Internet.

This is what's happening in Vienna and Graz (FunkFeuer).
Exactly, the default route is not propagated to adjacent zones (at the beginning several issues, mostly by BGP, were related with this).
I refer to mesh clouds to some areas that uses "dinamic routing protocols" like OLSR or bmx, although at least one BGP AS also has a default route. All these areas are reacheable

Preferably, community networks also get public IP space (PI) and BGP4 uplinks to the Internet, to have a *real* network connected to the Internet, not a mesh hidden behind a NAT...



b-. Some VPN links to local ISP facilities or user-owned adsl

Again, what does that mean? I would really like an overview of how that VPN architecture works, whether user owned or ISP facility based.

That's the way Freifunk do it in Berlin as I understand: You don't have a single Internet gateway, but several users sponsoring (part of) their DSL connectivity... This works for TCP connections that are NATed as long as the default route doesn't change...
A real life exemple, a local ISP serves "full" internet connectivity to clients, the ISP provides a PPTP server and all the clients configure their PPP data to connect to that server, if everything is OK clients get a default route inside their LAN

In Graz, we're also using VPNs to connect "islands" where there is no direct radio link (yet) available. Experience shows that with the mesh network organically growing and bridging the former "islands", the VPN eventually becomes obsolete...



c-. Most users uses the proxy in their area, seetled by hand in their browsers, but a firefox plugin was created to makes this easier 
Do you have to manually define which one to use on each client?


Again how does a Firefox plugin assist in all this?

I'm also curious about this.

But honestly I don't think that a community network should have to rely on browser plugins for proper routing. That should be transparent to the users...
The plugin https://addons.mozilla.org/ca/firefox/addon/guifiproxy/ not relates to routing, it's just an easy to change proxy settings. 
Since most of the internet connectivity to guifi.net users relay on proxy-servers we developed a what we call proxy-federation, one user can use its zone proxy server but also all the others federated proxy not in its zone, but reacheable inside the guifi.net network. So, in case a proxy fails you can use adjacents zone one to still get access to the internet. This plugin makes easier to do the settings change. It has a drop-down list with a list of nearest proxies, changing proxy is as easy as chossing another in this list

Alex

BTW: I might be totally wrong on some of the assumptions above. Anyway, I think that med-mesh is a *great* idea!

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