[Freedombox-discuss] Introducing myself and netsukuku

Luca Dionisi luca.dionisi at gmail.com
Fri Feb 18 15:22:04 UTC 2011


Hi all

My name's Luca.
Yesterday I came to know about this project and their goals. I
listened to Eben Moglen's keynote at FOSDEM (via internet).
I had some nice chat with some members on the IRC room.

I saw that the first step in the roadmap is definition of hardware and
software requirements.
I got from Moglen's speech that mesh networking is definitely one of
them. So I wondered if the project netsukuku had gotten any sort of
attention from the freedombox project's members. And it seems that
many never heard of it.

Netsukuku is a project that was born with a very similar set of goals,
but it focused on making a routing protocol available that could allow
the self-formation and self-maintenance of a mesh network able to
scale up to billions of nodes.
As its main website says since 2005, Netsukuku is an ad-hoc network
system designed to handle massive numbers of nodes with minimal
consumption of CPU and memory resources. It can be used to build a
world-wide distributed, fault-tolerant, anonymous, and
censorship-immune network, fully independent from the Internet.

Nowadays, the project has code written that almost completely
implement the theory that has been conceived in the first years and
has evolved also recently. The main author is now taking a Ph.D at
Cambridge working on theories on mesh networks and is little concerned
with the code. But a few developers have continued to do it.

Netsukuku daemon runs on all the nodes of the network and takes care
of any network interface that the user wish. Be it a wired, a radio in
ad-hoc or in AP mode or in station mode, a virtual nic passing through
a VPN, whatever. The user can pass any number of them, and the daemon
is able to do mesh also with only one.

The network deployed is completely separate and independent from the
Internet. Nonetheless, current implementation also allows any node to
share its connection to the Internet. This node is called a "gateway".
Any other node can exploit up to 10 nearest gateways' connections to
the Internet at the same time.

Also a replacement of DNS is provided. ANDNA (A Netsukuku Domain Name
Architecture) is a non hierarchical and decentralized system of
hostname management used in the Netsukuku network. It fully replaces
the DNS and any node can register up to 256 hostnames.

If anybody is interested I invite you to see the main site
http://netsukuku.freaknet.org.
It hasn't been updated for a long time, but the development went on.
For more up to date info I can point you to my blog
http://pyntk.blogspot.com where I am documenting my tentatives to
deploy a network with the last code.

Regards
--Luca



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