On Wed, May 03, 2000 at 03:38:41PM +1000, Craig Small wrote:
> G'day All,
> I have had a look around all the hamradio converse bridges and found
> that none of them have anything approaching a decent license. This
> means that distributions cannot distrbute them legally and all sorts
> of other horrible consequences.
I think this can be easily changes by getting the permission for a
licence-change from Dieter, Fred and Mat. I know I promised to
contact them when we were discussing this at IRC recently, but I
had too much other things to do lately.
>
> There is a lot of tainted code in existing implementations that either
> do not allow you to use or copy it or have conflicting licenses which
> means you cannot use it anyway. That is why we need to start from
> scratch on the core part.
>
> I also know people have ideas about what things could/should be added,
> we can look at that too. I have been going through the various
> documentation and reading about the protocols, what is missing is the
> user<->server protocol.
>
> This email is a call for others who have similar ideas to test to see if
> we have sufficient interest. I know some people have been mumbling
> about doing this before, we then let's actually go out and build this
> thing.
Jochen, DG6VJ, did talk about his ideas at the PR-Convention in
Darmstadt last month. It is in the scriptum, but I think he can
make it available in postscript (German, though). To summarize the
ideas: The Network should allow cycles to avoid net-splits, which are
very annoying especially in the EU converse network which consists of
about 90-100 convers nodes, all of them being linked over _radio_
links.
To have a non-hierarchic structure, each message needs to get a serial
number (seperatly for each host) and a ttl. To avoid unnecessary
transmissions, the system should be able to (temporarily) suspend
a link when it receives old data over this route. When a supplying
link failes he can re-activate the "sleeping" renundant link.
We want to use serial numbers, not hashes or something, because we
need low memory consumption. Gunter of FlexNet is interested in having
this system in his new rmnc master, which will not have a harddisk or
virtual memory.
Another question is how to route personal (/m call) messages through a
network of this style.
We don't have a protocol specification and no working code yet.
Other details are IRC-Like descriptive aplhanumeric channel-names and
perhaps some kind of user-authentication.
What is very low in priority is anything which has to do with
internet-based interlinks. But it shouldn't be hard to do all this
over plain ip, if the platform supports it.
BTW all these pp-derivatives such as tpp etc aren't that common here,
because they are very unix-specific. The pp (current version 3.13)
runs on Unix, DOS FlexNet, Xnet (on TNC3 eg), TNN, etc.. The new one
should be portable to embedded systems as well.
- hp
--
Hans-Peter Zorn, Karlsruhe, Germany
http://www.stud.uni-karlsruhe.de/~uhsm/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] (preferred)
http://1409.org/people/hp/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] (hamradio stuff)
