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Start your own Internet Resiliency Club

(bowshock.nl)
579 points todsacerdoti | 2 comments | 16 Jun 25 07:38 UTC | HN request time: 0.419s | source
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liotier ◴[16 Jun 25 09:00 UTC] No.44287756[source]▶
Mesh networks are the foundation - they are essential to disaster resilience. Then what services to run over them ?

Real time chat: wild unsecure simplicity proven to run anywhere (IRC), bells & whistles with contemporary security (Matrix), some mesh native that almost no one knows ? What about post-disaster onboarding of actual users ?

Store & forward messaging: SMTP & friends may work nicely, but with actually distributed servers - in each local disaster POP. Also needs timeout and retry parameters to keeping stuff in queues practically forever.

Forums: anything better than ol' NNTP ? Other protocols merely adopted intermittent indirect connectivity - NNTP was born in it !

Is anything more sophisticated or more interactive realistic for actual disaster ?

An onboarding kit with clients for each major OS (à la AOL CDROM !) might be handy too, for snearkernet distribution over USB dongles.

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bkummel ◴[16 Jun 25 12:42 UTC] No.44289008[source]▶
I think the point of the article is not to use that mesh network as a replacement for internet. I think the author's idea is that the mesh network would provide the "resilience club" a communication channel while they work on recovering the regular internet.
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1. lambdaone ◴[16 Jun 25 15:39 UTC] No.44290628[source]▶
The real "resilience teams" are going to be at the telcos/ISPs, and they will have dark fibre between their networks and autonomous backup power in their data centres. They will be able to do IRC, VoIP telephony, email, etc. between their networks over statically routed point-to-point IP between their local networks even if BGP and the transit networks go down so they can "black start" the Internet. (Back in my ISP days, I remember reading about there being a private telephone network just for AS operators' NOCs to talk to one another quite independenty of the PSTN.)

For anything that takes even those out (eg. a "Big One" quake in California), you fall back to radio hams and autonomous radio links for the disaster services.

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2. GTP ◴[16 Jun 25 16:14 UTC] No.44290946[source]▶
The article's author mentioned speaking with some telco people, which apparently weren't aware of any resiliency emergency plan. Maybe there's some difference between EU countries and the USA on this.