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The Xicada Network
The Xicada.net community network project
was started in the fall of 2002, and ended in October of 2006. Its
initial goals included:
The encrypted links were implemented using OpenVPN tunneling software, GNU Zebra
routing daemons, and a
collection of FreeBSD
, Linux
, OpenBSD
, and even Cisco
routers. At one point,
there were several IPSec+GRE links, but these dwindled in favor of
OpenVPN, which incurred much less overhead.
The last nodes online were owned by Brenden Conte, Matt Wronka
, Derek Konigsberg
, and me. Geographic locations included North
Brunswick, NJ, Orlando, FL, Troy, NY, Charlotte, NC, Sarasota, FL,
Tampa, FL, and Parsippany, NJ.
Previous nodes were maintained by Rahul Dhar, Jameel Akari
, Larry Lansing
, and
Fred Smith
.
Support from RPI came from Professor
Kalyanaraman
and others in the ECSE Networks Lab
. The
experimental bananas protocol, a project of Professor
Kalyanaraman, was slated for testing Xicada network. Past members
of Xicada were working with the Division of the Chief Information Officer
at RPI to potentially
place wireless antennas and yagis on buildings throughout campus to
improve lacenty and avoid certain firewall issues. This was
indefinitely stalled, due to lac kof nodes at RPI.
One of the main obstacles was organization of a common DNS system throughout the network. This was been solved through a web-based DNS zone administration system I developed. It allowed members of the Xicada community to publish all their zones and nameserver IPs. Individual nameservers then routinely (once a day) pulled the DNS data and reload their configuration files.
When I ran djbdns(tinydns+dnscache) on my network, and tried to implement forwarders with
Fred, (who was also using djbdns) we ran into a bug in dnscache.
When a zone and nameserver IP are entered in the forwarders
directory, dnscache sends all zone-specific queries to the server IP
address via a recursive DNS query. This is unsatisfactory, since
on Xicada it's preferred for only the caching nameservers to exchange
queries, not authoritative servers (excluding BIND, which is both).
We found that queries sent between dnscache services were dropped,
since dnscache only responds to recursive queries. I ran across
this
page
describing a similar situation. A patch was available
to have different servers and caches directories, for
non-recursive and recursive queries, respectively. However, this
patch conflicted with Fefe
"s IPv6 patch, which I was currently using. I merged these
two patches for version 1.05 of djbdns, and they are available here.
You might find these links helpful:
Just as a side note, before I used OpenVPN for my nodes (home and at
RPI), I used a neat program called CIPE.
CIPE, or Crypto IP Encapsulation, is only available under Linux
and Win32 platforms, which limits it. Of course, since it was my
first experiment with tunnelling, I liked it. It can't be used
directly between Xicada nodes because of the diversity of platforms and
certain generic tunneling driver multicast issues. I actually made
a small presentation on CIPE at SIG
Linux
. PowerPoint slides are here and pdf's here. I also found a funny
network diagram I made back before I was connected to Xicada. Take
a look here.
The last Xicada topology existed as two autonomous systems: 65003 and 65011. Brenden Conte administrated AS65011, and I took care of 65003, which included my netblocks, along with everybody else who didn't want to run BGP.
Previous network assignments are listed below.
Owner | Network Name | IP Blocks | AS |
Mark Kamichoff | Prolixium | 10.3/16, 172.16.3/24 | AS65003 |
Derek Konigsberg | Logicprobe | 10.4/16, 172.16.4/24 | AS65003 |
Matt Wronka | n/a | 10.8/16, 172.16.8/24 | AS65003 |
Brenden Conte | Forgotten Realm | 10.11/16, 172.16.11/24 | AS65011 |
Overall, latency could have been worse, considering that most of the inter-network connections formed a poorly constructed tree graph:
[chronos:22:33]% traceroute -q1 photon.logicprobe.org traceroute to photon.logicprobe.org (10.4.1.2), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets 1 0.br.zing.prolixium.net (10.3.6.254) 1.552 ms 2 1.xl.starfire.prolixium.net (10.3.7.30) 2.018 ms 3 0.tun.dax.prolixium.net (10.3.254.18) 30.431 ms 4 rtr-logicprobe-4-14.xicada.net (172.16.4.14) 71.959 ms 5 photon.logicprobe.org (10.4.1.2) 73.384 ms [chronos:22:33]% traceroute -q1 hume.matt.wronka.org traceroute to hume.matt.wronka.org (10.8.4.67), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets 1 0.br.zing.prolixium.net (10.3.6.254) 1.704 ms 2 1.xl.starfire.prolixium.net (10.3.7.30) 1.325 ms 3 0.tun.dax.prolixium.net (10.3.254.18) 34.144 ms 4 wronka.prolixium.net (172.16.3.7) 44.519 ms 5 hume.matt.wronka.org (10.8.4.67) 44.927 ms
Brenden Conte ran the Phynd search engine on the Xicada network. It used to run
at RPI, too, and attracted some news.
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