[Commotion-dev] Unifying Serval and Commotion Mesh

[Josh King]

Hi Paul,

Something I've thought about but which I should probably ask your 
opinion on: what do you think about the feasibility of a generic serval 
 MDP proxy which presents, say, a SOCKS interface or something for 
sending generic TCP/IP traffic through the overlay network?

On Wed 19 Dec 2012 03:31:53 PM EST, Paul Gardner-Stephen wrote:
> OpenPGP: *Parts of the message have NOT been signed or encrypted*
>
> Hi All,
>
> From a Serval perspective, we chose to stick with IPv4 for a few reasons:
>
> 1. IPv4 headers are smaller, which on limited bandwidth is always a
> good thing, especially when you start passing around lots of addresses
> to manage your topology.
> 2. At a global scale 64 bits of host address in IPv6 is actually a bit
> marginal for avoiding collisions among randomly self-allocated
> addresses.  This is more of a concern for networks consisting of very
> mobile devices, such as phones.  Overall, it can probably be managed.
> 3. IPv6 adds overhead without actually solving some of the more
> important problems, such as preventing address spoofing, really
> avoiding address collisions, and allowing easy end-to-end encryption.
> Our view is that a public-key based overlay is a better solution,
> which is why we have created one.  We dealt with the long-address
> problem by baking in address abbreviation, so that the shortest unique
> prefix of each address is used, reducing overhead to sub-IPv4 levels
> in many cases, and combined overlay+IPv4 overhead to less than IPv6
> overhead.
> 4. IPv6 is not available on all devices we wish to support, e.g., some
> Symbian phones, Windows Mobile phones, and very likely some Android
> phones.  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_IPv6_support_in_operating_systems.
> 5. We are creating digital packet radio interfaces for long-range
> meshing that will have insufficient bandwidth to support IPv6
> overhead.
>
> Of course, for Serval the equation is a little different, because
> routing traditional TCP/IP traffic is not our highest priority.
>
> I should add that some of our team is more sympathetic to IPv6 than I
> am, and that we don't see a problem with making use of IPv6 when it is
> available, but, personally, I am somewhat reluctant to rely on it, and
> harbor concerns about the increased overhead, at least unless some
> sort of address abbreviation is used in the routing protocols (which
> maybe it already is by now).
>
> Paul.
>
> On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 2:54 AM, The Doctor <drwho at virtadpt.net> wrote:
>>
>
> ********* *BEGIN ENCRYPTED or SIGNED PART* *********
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> On 12/19/2012 10:49 AM, stephane at shimaore.net wrote:
>
>> IPv6 in a non-Internet connected network is probably a good
>> choice.
>
> I think that's what Resau Libre' does.
>
>> One thing to be careful about (for Internet-connected meshes), is
>> that IPv6 connectivity is far from ubiquituous: the node(s) on the
>> mesh that connect to the Internet might not be able to route IPv6,
>> for example because their ISPs don't support it yet -- this should
>> become less of an issue over time. Hopefully that's already taken
>> into account by the mesh routing protocol.
>
> It's something of a surprise to find an ISP that does support IPv6.
>
> That said, the solution I've seen deployed in the field is v6-in-v4
> tunneling at the gateways.  I haven't tried it myself but I'm told it
> works.
>
>> Maybe more awkwardly, IPv6 and IPv4 are actually more like two
>> separate technologies when it comes to connectivity: the same way
>> that at some point in time you could access the Internet over IPX
>> and over IPv4 (I'm showing my age..), nowadays you can access it
>> using IPv6 and IPv4, but
>
> Not really.  I went hunting for floppy disks at $work this morning for
> a spectrum analyzer.
>
>> Finally, I don't know about serval, but my experience with IPv6 and
>> IPv4 and VoIP is that most stacks do not handle both together well;
>> I'm not even talking about creepy situations where signaling might
>> use one and media the other. >:)
>
> Whoa.  Bizarre...
>
> --
> The Doctor [412/724/301/703] [ZS|Media]
> Developer, Project Byzantium: http://project-byzantium.org/
>
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>>
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>


--
Josh King

"I am an Anarchist not because I believe Anarchism is the final goal,
but because there is no such thing as a final goal." -Rudolf Rocker

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