Aspies For Freedom

I want to - anyone want to help who has at the very least a computer with a reasonably fast connection on a static IP?

A pile of nodes all over the world that act as both routers and tunnel brokers for clients - slowly replacing the tunnels with physical links.

The first node is taking shape as we speak

Are you gonna make a website/project page dedicated to this so called 'Aspie-Net'. I would like to offer... But only if i had the proper skills and bandwidth. Let alone a Static IP.

So hows the first node coming along?

Since posting this subject we began playing with a simple 3-node network, I'm now getting ready to do this again with the real thing - I just finished setting up my node here and getting ready to peer again.

So what type of information will they be exchanging. And who will be able to use this network?

Will it just be some form or Intranet where we would have pages which can be only viewable if your on the network.

How about we have our own like IRC and Email system... And maybe a file sharing system...

Anything that can run over TCP/IP would work. If you have a spare machine you could even turn it into a dedicated router and connect other machines to AmyNet via it without having to install the client.

As i've just finished university for this year (except for one or 2 assignments) i'll be able to get a public webpage up soon now that I have the time available.

The connections will all be implemented using VPN technology. Essentially, each router-router link will be a private VPN, and end users would connect to a VPN server on their nearest node. An end user's router would connect like a normal client but perform NAT or route an IP block from the node they are linked to.

You would need to have a router on your home network that performs NAT to AmyNet or you would need a client installed on your computer. If using a client though care should be taken to properly firewall your computer.

this is the normal way for home users:

your computer----------192.168.0.2 (DSL router)---------internet

for AmyNet you'd set up a spare machine (192.168.0.3 if you like) and get it online, then you'd install a client on it. This spare machine would connect to the nearest server and start sending packets. The DSL router would route any packets destined for AmyNet to the spare machine. The spare machine would then wrap the packets up in a tunnel and send them out to the internet.

These are the network addresses for AmyNet (they're currently unallocated by IANA so hopefully won't clash with the real internet):

180.0.0.0/8
181.0.0.0/8
182.0.0.0/8
183.0.0.0/8

How to set a route varies from router to router but you basically set routes to these networks and point them at the AmyNet router.

That part is not so simple, you'd have to change your default nameservers to a nameserver that knows about .amy names and knows where to find the root nameserver for .amy (which is sitting on my living room floor right now).

Not really, you'd ask whoever you're connecting to what a good DNS server to use is. This can be configured automatically using the client.

The client will just be OpenVPN (though some links can use other software or even physical connections - i plan on attempting a dialup link at some point).

As for what it will run (or rather, what it already runs as we had a basic 3-node network up a while ago):

Linux/OpenBSD/FreeBSD
Quagga routing software
OpenVPN

Some nodes could make use of other software apart from OpenVPN (I plan to experiment with the FreeBSD GIF device, though I have had problems implementing this since some ISPs block it).

I don't know anyone else within range of my house who would want to try peering. The dial-up link would just be a one-off experiment (simply because it would be too expensive to have it on 24/7). DSL-DSL links or ISDN links would be interesting though. Plenty of bandwidth. The only problem of course is money and this is the reason to build on the back of the current internet and use tunnels.