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Andrew Singleton singletona082 at gmail.com
Thu Dec 2 20:54:23 GMT 2021
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Would be interested in that video ya.
Similarly I need to do a proper writeup of the thing I want so i can post to places like this so people can tell me of that exists or not.
Dec 2, 2021 2:24:32 PM John Goerzen <jgoerzen at complete.org>:
On Thu, Dec 02 2021, Andrew Singleton wrote:
Look. I live Simi-Rural. Meaning not so far out that you have hundreds
of acres for cattle, or farms or whatever. Just an eight acre piece of
land that's more of a family hobby project than anything. And yet that
is still a fairly sizeable chunk of land so far as traditional wifi is
concerned.
Hi Andrew,
I've been interested in these protocols for a long time. I've written
some stuff that runs atop LoRA and XBee SX, for instance, including PPP
or tun/tap IP/ethernet stacks.
HaLow looks like an interesting middle ground; not as long of a range
(1km vs 10km) but more easily integrated.
I hear you on the LoRA bandwidth. XBee SX is better, and I've seen
effective rates of 50Kbps out of the thing. My xbnet program at
https://github.com/jgoerzen/xbnet covers running TCP/IP using tun/tap as
well as PPP over it at
https://github.com/jgoerzen/xbnet/blob/master/doc/xbnet.1.md and I also
cover running UUCP over the thing. The XBee SX also has a
point-to-point "modem emulation" mode in which it looks behaves like a
regular modem to the OS (no translation code necessary). That removes
some of the possibilities of direct node-to-node communication, of
course, but could, eg, host a number of PPP connections for
connectivity.
The XBee devices are also interesting for a couple of other reasons.
One, is they support a self-assembling mesh in firmware, so you get mesh
routing without having to do anything on the software side. Very handy,
though of course it reduces available bandwidth. Secondly, they support
TX power up to 1W which is what allows them to achieve near-LoRA
distance while having a much faster bitrate. However, they are more
expensive than LoRA devices, and obviously in the case of the 1W ones,
more power-hungry.
Since we're talking about old protocols, there is, of course, UUCP.
There is a more modern replacement called NNCP that has quite a few nice
properties. It is still asynchronous, but it is fully encrypted and
authenticated, supports tor-style onion routing and async multicast, and
so forth. I have made some blog posts about it and also offer Usenet
feeds over NNCP. UUCP or NNCP would be perfect fits for something like
this.
Another interesting program is Syncthing. Think of it like a serverless
Dropbox. It is fully distributed, and every peer in a network can
propagate changes.
Both Syncthing and NNCP support a "traveler" device -- say a phone that
goes to civilization periodically and syncs up things that propagate
to/from a remote location.
And, there is NNTP, the protocol behind Usenet. Usenet can be
exchanged via NNTP, but also via asynchronous means (NNCP, UUCP, etc).
It can be done in a very low-bandwidth way and could propagate posts,
(small) files, etc.
Finally, don't forget email. It can be routed in all sorts of ways, too.
I have been writing and coding around some of this stuff. See:
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/tag/nncp
https://github.com/jgoerzen/nncp-tools
https://github.com/jgoerzen/gitsync-nncp/blob/main/gitsync-nncp.org
I also have a 5-minute lightning talk video I should get uploaded one of
these days...
- John