On Wednesday, 8 January 2025 07:19:13 GMT Iain R. Learmonth wrote:
Before buying a router, we should have a set of
requirements.
From my point of view, the thing we want first and foremost is a router that
makes our lives a little easier.
The current one has a WebUI that is painfully slow, has painfully short
cookies and makes doing anything particularly hard. It would serve us best as
a Modem/bridge to our own PPPoE endpoint, which ironically we had before I
turned everything off (as it had fallen over too many times with no way for
anyone in space to revive it!).
There's a weird DHCP/Static/something else problem floating around that I am
trying to resolve by slowly just making everything static :D
On Alex's point, the network was simplified/torn apart partly so we got it
under control of people in the space in a manner that was understandable and
adminstrable. I'd like to keep that philosophy going forward, so that's
requirement number one - Documentation and accessibility!
The last time round we had this, it was irl's openbsd router and ansible [1],
which gave us a good config store and was stable as fuck but I never felt
confident/educated enough to commit changes/add requests for static IPs, so
something a little more user friendly would be good - in the last x years,
administration of most services have fallen to me, so let's treat me as the
user it has to be friendly towards.
As I don't feel clever enough to bring a Debian (or other) box up to being a
router using the command line only, something other than just a box would be
great. A box running an appliance software would work, btu we'd need to source
the box. We do have a Juniper SRX-300 but no one knows JunOS, and we did have
an Edgerouter lite 'back in the day' but it's missing in action!
Personally, I'd like us back on IPv6, as I have IPv6 to my desk at home and I
think our shared computer club network should at least rival my network at
home. This'll need a tunnel of some variety to a provider as A&A don't give us
an allocation for that at the moment (but their website may offer that).
I would like our network to be a little more segmented going forward. Iain and
I have discussed this a little already and, this plays in to that:
I would also like to complete the setup of the RADIUS
proxy so we can get an
eduroam SSID up and running on the WAPs.
An eduroam SSID/VLAN would be great, our current router won't like VLANs as it
barely likes static IPs. I'd quite like to use RADIUS or something else to
have logins for a 57N-members SSID for members that has access to all services
on the network, 57N-guest for guests with limitations, and probably 57N-IOT as
I'd like to expand home assistant and hide that random gear away from our main
network too.
I would like to have a go at raspberry pi colo this
year and have negotiated
us some (slightly tainted) IPv4 space for this. This will come to us via a
VPN. We also have an IPv6 allocation that we can announce via remote BGP
peering, either via the hackerspace ASN or via my ASN depending on whether
the hackerspace wants to pay for its ASN (these recently became
chargeable).
Given we're discussing paying for a router I suspect we won't want to pay for
an ASN that so far I don't think we've used in any meaningful way.
This is a cool idea though, and I would be interested in seeing where it goes.
I want us to have a network where we can offer this kind of stuff, segmenting off
somewhere to play that won't take the main network down if things fall over.
I think that aligns with:
These are also very project centric requirements and
shouldn’t fuck with our
main general purpose internet so unless we have good reasons we should
learn from previous experiences and have this be a separate router,
downstream of the main router. Given the outside connection is 80Mbps, a
router on a stick would still be able to max that out.
Primarily, I'd like us to have a network that I/we can fix when it goes wrong
but isn't a project in itself that detracts from time hacking on other stuff.
[1]
https://github.com/hackerdeen/spaceble
--
Hibby <hibby(a)debian.org>
Debian Developer
Packet Radioist
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