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from the hacking-as-hacking-was-intended-to-be dept.
Michael Weissenstein reports for the Associated Press:
Cut off from the Internet, young Cubans have quietly linked thousands of computers into a hidden network that stretches miles across Havana, letting them chat with friends, play games and download hit movies in a mini-replica of the online world that most can't access.
Home Internet connections are banned for all but a handful of Cubans, and the government charges nearly a quarter of a month's salary for an hour online in government-run hotels and Internet centers. As a result, most people on the island live offline, complaining about their lack of access to information and contact with friends and family abroad.
A small minority have covertly engineered a partial solution by pooling funds to create a private network of more than 9,000 computers with small, inexpensive but powerful hidden Wi-Fi antennas and Ethernet cables strung over streets and rooftops spanning the entire city. Disconnected from the real Internet, the network is limited, local and built with equipment commercially available around the world, with no help from any outside government, organizers say.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday January 26 2015, @07:03PM
Network administration must be a gigantic pain.
Forget connection layer problems, imagine trying to manage the routing tables and DNS for such an enormous ad hoc network.
(Score: 3, Funny) by VLM on Monday January 26 2015, @07:43PM
multicast dns and random numbers in a flat network (like 10.0.0.0/8 or heck just 0.0.0.0/0)... easier than you'd think. Given truly random numbers in a /8 the odds of a collision are really quite low although theres always at least two idiots that insists on being #1 aka 10.1.1.1
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday January 27 2015, @01:58AM
Why wouldn't the put up a DHCP server ? you can hardly find a wifi router without one built in, and any ancient 486 box can be a router.
There was a fairly extensive disconnected network in one of the neighborhoods in Bethel Alaska in the early years when the Doom and Quake games came out. It was pretty much all coax back strung through back yards then. When the internet arrived the gamesters didn't even want to connect their "ratnet".
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday January 27 2015, @12:23PM
Then you end up with two goofs both insisting on running dhcp servers...
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday January 27 2015, @09:27PM
Which works fine, for any properly configured dhcp server.
But chances are the goof that adds a new server is clueless enough to not coordinate the net block size, and therefore serves requests with the wrong subnet mask.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 26 2015, @07:51PM
And through that fire they became strong, and network admin'd the world anew.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday January 26 2015, @09:13PM
It's pretty nifty, but I suspect that the routers run something like OSPF between them, perhaps segregated into geographical nodes, with BGP on top of each one. These aren't rocket science, just standard protocols for your average home router. My 3 routers at home have a wifi backplanes, 3 cabled subnets, and a wifi general access subnet, with a pppoe over vdsl for the upstream connection, and a backup 3G dongle that kicks in if the upstream dies. OSPF manages the routing, total of about $220 of equipment including the 3G dongle and chipping.
Something probably simpler would be say 15 homes hanging of one central location, with static routes to each home from there, knocking the number of routable notes to 600. Then say 10 ASes with 60 OSPF nodes in each one, with each node connected to 2 or 3 others. Far larger than anything I've built, but I don't think there would be an issue.
Will OSPF scale to 9000 routers?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by aXis on Tuesday January 27 2015, @03:20AM
Many many years ago I helped build and maintain a Wireless Freenet in Perth, Australia. The only way to make them work is to have a single nominated person maintaining a database and allocating addresses, otherwise it's mayhem.
Each base station operator was given a /24 subnet and would typically subnet it further to allow for local wireless clients (eg a /26), internal LAN clients (also a /26) and upstream point - point links (/30). They could implement any firewalling or internal routing they - liked.
Between base stations we then managed the routes via BGP and each operator was given an AS number. It was tricky to balance link costs and occasionaly an admin would advertise a bad route, but in general it was good solution. We tried our best to keep the routes aggregated where possible.
For DNS, each base station operator was allowed to choose a domain name. The TLD was managed at a cental master station, and local DNS servers at the base staitons would manage their own domain and do zone transfers to the master along with caching for clients.