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Author Topic: Skyenet  (Read 1780 times)

Weaver

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Skyenet
« on: August 24, 2019, 09:57:10 AM »

I have been reading the small print concerning the local long-range wireless network. (LR-WLAN ?)

Amazingly I read that "SSH clients cannot be used on the network without permission."

Used by whom? I’m pretty sure that that isn’t true; I bet an SSH client can be used without permission, because if I were a user I could just fire up an SSH client and go for it.

It doesn’t say whether or not such permission would be granted. How many times does someone have to ask for such permission, and what actions, scenarios or periods might such a permission cover. Perhaps it is a clumsy mistaken wording, and they are trying to say that by default TCP port 22 is blocked, for some reason - and they are assuming that you are using that particular well-known port for SSH, but maybe what they are trying to say is that you have to ask for someone to unblock it for you?

Why has someone got it in for SSH? If someone feels threatened because they won’t be able to snoop on users’ traffic then the same problem applies to TLS, SSL, PGP, S/MIME, IP/SEC and VPNs forty other encryption systems. If the user tunnels all traffic through an encrypted VPN then Skyenet just won’t be able to spy on anything, never mind SSH.

The page goes to great lengths telling you that it isn’t telling you anything. I can’t even see any service description. Where’s the detailed description of the exact nature of the services provided ? ("what am I getting for my money") And I don’t see quantitative performance guarantees; IPv6? How many IPv4 addresses? It seems to go to great lengths to emphasise the pig-in-a-poke nature of the thing: You are not going to know what you are going to get and we certainly are not going to tell you. No details of filtering of IP protocols or TCP and UDP ports, no details on wider internet censorship / blocking - never mind IPv6 - so no idea of how full a service it is in terms of access to the internet. I can’t see anything about firewalling; whether or not inbound access from the wider internet to the user’s IPs is blocked by stateful firewalling, and whether or not that is something that the user can sort out.


I realise that this dubious ‘service’ might be useful. One can assume that it shifts some kinds of IPv4 packets at some kind of unknown speed, with an unknown rate of packet loss. Because these performance indicators are unknown, and there’s no guarantee on uptime or time-to-fix as well as the forty other pig-in-a-poke factors, it could never be used as a regular access method. The packet loss might completely screw up everything else if the use of this LR-WLAN were simultaneously combined with other access methods in the wrong fashion, and such packet loss might wreck overall reliability if LR-WLAN were bonded in with ECMPR.

I can’t help thinking that done right it could be an enhancement. It surely must have potential as a failover technology. I’m using 3G for this now but it’s very slow, but who cares, you can’t have everything, and may be able to get a 4G USB NIC going properly. The problem at the moment is the 4G USB NICs themselves - I have not got access to one that acts as a straight modem although it may be possible to get hold of a suitable model made by ZTE, unclear to me at the moment, or might be able to get help from AA with other good models at some point. The costs per byte are huge too if we do get an outage, but normally costs are spectacularly low per month without failures. Given the horrible (=undefined) nature of the Skyenet service, its only advantages are speed and low cost in an outage, set against high standby cost if it’s not being used, plus a lot of hassle trying to work around its unsuitable presentation - it would need AA L2TP during failover to make it usable, which would make it even more expensive.

One final truly crazy thought though - could the LR-WLAN give an additional benefit besides being a failover mechanism? What about using it for upstream only ? I am desperate for more upstream throughput. Could this be set up so that things won’t be vulnerable to any possible upstream packet loss in the LR-WLAN? (Suggestion: no.) The Skynet service gives no meaningful performance figures but hints that with no users you could get 20Mpbs downstream, it’s so lazy that it doesn’t even differentiate between upstream and downstream. However, as best I can guess about the nature of the network, I wouldn’t be surprised if it is symmetrical upstream vs downstream, and with its user community of home users and soho users, the upstream will likely be very lightly loaded anyway. So perhaps the figures of 8Mbps and 20Mbps which are quoted as most-optimistic figures apply to upstream as well as downstream. If I could get 8Mbps upstream bonded with my existing 1.4Mps upstream then that would be fantastic. There would be the usual problems with reduced MTU, because I would need to use AA’s L2TP service to tunnel through SkyNet. A lot of hassle and two additional per-month costs.
« Last Edit: August 24, 2019, 11:35:27 PM by Weaver »
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niemand

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Re: Skyenet
« Reply #1 on: August 24, 2019, 11:43:33 AM »

No idea about the service but given the website was made via Wix and still has the banner on the top it's not the most technically masterful thing.

The scenarios you describe are already covered by various VPN-type technologies of varying degrees of automation and complexity.

Could probably hack something together yourself, also.

EDIT: You're getting MTU 'issues' whatever, though I wouldn't really call them issues. You have to encapsulate and have extra intelligence to achieve what you want to, not least from the point of view of having different types of traffic treated differently.
« Last Edit: August 24, 2019, 11:46:43 AM by CarlT »
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niemand

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Re: Skyenet
« Reply #2 on: August 24, 2019, 03:18:07 PM »

This might be worth a read - https://www.facebook.com/SCTSkyenet/

It's exactly what it says it is - a community-run WiFi network spanning a huge amount of sparsely populated land profoundly dependent on radio links running towards the edge of their capability connected via residential-grade routers :)
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Weaver

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Re: Skyenet
« Reply #3 on: August 25, 2019, 01:30:01 AM »

@ CarlT one of my neighbours hosts the Heasta node on his patch high up the bank.


From where I am, much higher up still, I have views deep into Loch Shubhairne. I have some dim, very vague recollection that there may be a line of sight link from into Loch Shubhairne from some point in Skye, which could be Heasta. I know that nine years ago there was a link across the Linne Shléibhteach from the Duisdeil Hotel it somewhere on the mainland because the owner was telling me that she gave a home and power to some hardware for this purpose at her hotel. So I don’t know if a Heasta-Loch Shubhairne link exists but if it does it is possible that Heasta replaced the Duisdeil Hotel as the Skye-side terminus, or maybe both are going, which would make sense for redundancy and signal coverage. Heasta is far far higher up and maybe that is a significant virtue; it is a few miles further west, which is bad, and a mile or so further north, which is maybe good as it is the optimal north-south point that has the best view, deepest into the sea loch.

I would think that there might be an RF line of sight link from Heasta down to An t-Òrd which is on the west coast of Skye directly to the south across the Skye sea-loch of Loch Eiseort, as I have a good view that far to the south and I can even make out a couple of the houses that are highest up the bank at An t-Òrd.

So as well as giving service to Heasta itself, adding a site here links other sites together nicely, and Heasta is - I suspect - the optimal choice for a direct link from the east end of Loch Shubhairne to Skye, and could also be a useful alternative route to the outside world.
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aesmith

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Re: Skyenet
« Reply #4 on: August 26, 2019, 12:27:59 PM »

I guess they could mean mean "VPN" not "SSH". 
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Weaver

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Re: Skyenet
« Reply #5 on: August 28, 2019, 12:15:41 AM »

I wonder why someone might have it in for VPNs. Not knowing the difference between the two is not good, not cluefull.

it means anyway that I could not consider using it as some sort of backup, because I might use SSH. I do use SSH now, to my external, hosted raspberry pi.
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aesmith

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Re: Skyenet
« Reply #6 on: August 29, 2019, 03:20:03 PM »

Why not ask them?   I have seen some community schemes whop didn't want to support VPN traffic, maybe because they didn't want them used for business use.  Or maybe because they thought it was a sign of excessive use.  I can't imagine why they'd object to SSH, unless possibly they thought their kit might be vulnerable to unauthorised connection attempts.
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