[Freedombox-discuss] Freedom Box UUCP?

[stillyet at googlemail.com]

On 2 March 2011 06:37, William Astle <lost at l-w.ca> wrote:

> On 11-03-01 10:16 PM, Anthony Papillion wrote:
>
>> Like most people. I haven't used UUCP for years. But I've been thinking
>> about ways it might be used within the Freedom Box project and, to a
>> large degree, it makes sense. Specifically, UUCP works very well in
>> place where there isn't an Internet connection and can be configured for
>> email and file exchange.
>>
>> What are your thoughts on using UUCP within Freedom Box?
>>
> UUCP might be a reasonable choice for communication between two nodes that
> both happen to support it. However, as anything else, it would be a huge
> step backward.
>
> Using UUCP as anything other than a single hop protocol would cause all
> sorts of confusion, not least because of bang paths. The fact that UUCP
> requires specifying every hop from source to destination would be unpleasant
> in the face of rapidly (for some value of rapidly) changing topology.
>
> Of course, figuring a way to route messages through the mesh without user
> knowledge of the path is a problem that needs to be solved and that is not
> an easy problem.


Bang paths is precisely the point. In the days when we all ran UUCP

(a) there was nothing better
(b) servers were large machines in well known fixed locations with well
known phone numbers
(c) even so you often 'booked your slot' on the modem - dialled in at a
particular time to avoid contention

I strongly believe that the small distributed severlets which will allow
users to reclaim the information network need to be able to operate without
persistent connection to the global network, and need to be able to
propagate messages opportunistically towards the global network. Natural
disaster, civil disruption and just geography can all produce disconnected
islands of network. But also because these serverlets will now include
mobile devices, some devices will inevitably move between the island and the
global network continent, while others will have intermittent connections
onwards.

So I believe that we (where 'we' is the community of interest looking at
serverlets and the user-controlled information network generally, rather
than the Debian[r][tm] FreedomBox[r][tm] list specifically) need a store and
forward protocol, but we need a store and forward network which can discover
willing relays opportunistically in real time, and which critically does not
trust those relays (since they may be enemy honeytraps, or may simply never
be able to pass the message onwards) but sends only digitally signed,
tamperproof packets.

Clearly, S+FNGP is not a project for the Debian[r][tm] FreedomBox[r][tm]
list, but nevertheless there are some people on this list who will be
interested. And, for the avoidance of doubt, I'm not proposing a new
project, although I do hope to ensure that things like Tahrir and Serval, if
they develop store and forward technology, do so interoperably

Cheers

Simon

-- 
Simon Brooke :: http://www.journeyman.cc/~simon/

        ;; Stultus in monte
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