Re: virtual wireless interfaces / WDS

> start of a mesh routing protocol.  Ricochet of Los Gatos, Mesh

The Ricochet network is a poor example, please study their patents and FCC 
ID's.  Modem to Poletop 900Mhz 1w, Poletop to Poletop 2.4Ghz and/or 900Mhz 
and/or wired.  Clusters of poletops plug into a bank of T1s, all terminated 
at a central location.  Sounds like an ass load of POPs to me, not a mesh.

> Networks of Maitland, Florida, and the US military all have viable

Yes, closed-sourced chipsets and software are the solution..

> even have a start.  Their idea of routing is to use DHCP with a short

Who's idea is this?  I've been around the world, met dozens of CWN groups, 
I've never heard short DHCP lease time called a routing solution.

> about mesh routing.  viva la revolucion and all that, but let's be
> honest about this.  Your comrades have made minimal progress, and

I tend to disagree.. thousands of groups around the world have sprung up to 
adapt open source software principals to real world hardware solutions. 
Quite a bit of progress has been made, all without marketing dollars, 
standards bodies or and formal order.  Who has educated the masses on 
captive portals, WEP in-security, compatibility issues, etc... CWN's have.

I analgize CWN's to VoIP.  A lot of big companies involved, full of 
marketing fluff.  Plenty of GPL/BSD/etc alternatives exist, but aren't in 
the business of marketing.

> Third, 802.11 is very weak on avoiding interference.

The price point is right and drivers exist.  You don't need much more for 
extreme growth.  It's not perfect, but it's here today and real.  We'll 
deal with the negatives as they arise.

>    nicely with your captive portal strategies.

Portals are a hack.  802.1x is the solution, once the EAP battles settle 
down and clients are available for more OS's; tune in a year from now.

> and I'd rather see everything use opportunistic IPsec with
> certificates obtained through DNSSEC, because a lot of encryption

Security has always been the user's choice.  As BofH's, we can't ensure a 
100% secure system.  So, you roll out your Cisco-powered LEAP-security 
SecureID-login blah blah, great.  Joe dumb CxO brings his $100 Linksys in, 
that security all goes down the drain.  Again, security is the user's 
problem.  My home and work networks pass plain-text traffic, dont yours? 
CWN's should promote end-to-end security practices, but this shouldn't be a 
requirement.  I don't like HTML email or zone files w/o LOC records; but I 
don't drop their emails or queries.

--
Matt Peterson         another.geek.without.a.life
[email protected]       http://matt.peterson.org/
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