[Freedombox-discuss] Store-and-forward is a necessity

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

just some random comments along similar lines:

* like UUCP, SMTP was also designed to be resilient in the face of
significant disconnects and down-time.  many people forget this due to
its abuse for spam... :)  (no, you do not have to use SMTP _just_ for
transferring mail, as we well know.  i say this explicitly to avoid
any assumptions that i have said "yes!  use SMTP!  And Only For
Email!")

* nmbd (part of samba) - actually RFC1001 and RFC1002 - has the
problem of disappearing unreliable hosts solved for... decades.  it's
just not very well understood or appreciated that that's nmbd does.
doing peer-to-peer multi-LAN host detection and communicating host
availability network-wide is f*****g hard to get right.  back in
1997-9 at the CIFS conferences, we found that EVERY single implementor
of RFC1001/1002 takes about THREEEE years to get the implementation
correct.  INCLUDING microsoft themselves! apt-cache show samba

*avahi is a piece of shit by comparison to what nmbd can do: it's just
that everyone, when they hear the words "microsoft" and "network
neighbourhood", turns their back on nmbd, pulls their trousers down
and strains mightily to heave out a steaming turd in its general
direction, rather than recognise the value of what nmbd has provided.
think about this: DESPITE completely ignorant computer users
completely screwing up their network configurations, systems based
around the "network neighbourhood" _still_ work... :)

* n2n is a peer-to-peer Layer 2 VPN (similar to openvpn).  its only
flaw is that it requires all parties to agree a "key", and no
mechanism has been provided to "negotiate" such a key. apt-cache show
n2n

* babel is a mathematically-provably-correct routing algorithm that
can be used to replace BGP.  every system participates in the routing,
and there is no dependence on any one given system.  apt-cache show
babeld

also... hah!  it looks like there is something on top of babeld,
called ahcpd - wooow.  i hadn't heard of that one, before, until
today.

so - just food for thought: the pieces of the puzzle, to provide
resilient large-scale networking and communications infrastructure,
even in the face of absolutely zero "central servers", are beginning
to appear.

and the nice thing is - these are all debian packages.

the only thing i _haven't_ been able to find is a peer-to-peer DNS
service, but i beliieeeeve that there is someone working on that.  ok.
 they were _supposed_ to be: http://groups.google.com/group/dns-p2p -
ahh, actually someone's made an effort:
https://github.com/Mononofu/P2P-DNS

so.  there exists solid, real-world debian packages for the basics
behind the networking. as debian packages.  that's really good.

l.