[Mesh] PON back up, provisionally - help wanted

Hey y'all -  It appears that the People's Open Network outage has ended.  In an attempt to understand why PON was misbehaving, I've learned a lot about tunnels (<https://github.com/sudomesh/tunneldigger-lab>) and meshing protocols (<https://github.com/sudomesh/babeld-lab>),  collaborated with a bunch of friendly people,  re-wrote a script to create an exit node (see <https://github.com/sudom esh/exitnode> ), wrote a guide draft to setup and troubleshoot an exit node (see  <https ://github.com/sudomesh/exitnode#installation>), and helped others to create at least four new (test) exit nodes on digital ocean/ ubuntu 16.04.3.   After all this, it finally became apparent that the reason for the PON outage is a simple one, namely <https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/9843 481/> . It turned out that we all relied on an l2tp (what is that?) bug in order for our VPN (aka tunneldigger) to work. Last year, unfortunately, someone fixed the bug which, in turn, brought (parts of) our network down. If you are interested to learn more, please see <https://github.com/sud omesh/bugs/issues/8> . How can *you* help?  1. check to see if your peoplesopen ssid/wifi connects to the "big" internet.  2. help create patches for existing home nodes (see <https://github.com /sudomesh/bugs/labels/node%20patch%20pending>).  3. help upgrade our tunneldigger and deploy a test exit node to digital ocean using <https://github.com/sudomesh/exitnode>, also see <https://g ithub.com/sudomesh/tunneldigger/issues/8>gt;.   4. build your own Open Network by creating an exit node and configuring your nodes to use it, see <https://github.com/sudomesh/exitnode> . ... 42. donate https://peoplesopen.net/donate .  If you'd like to share/contribute, but don't now how, please holler on this mailing list or stop by on Sundays 1p at BYOI office hours at Omni. thx, -jorrit On Sun, 2018-02-11 at 22:51 -0800, Jorrit Poelen wrote: Network outage issue.  this exitnode stuff out, and run some tests.  a digital ocean droplet in < 5min (see https://github.com/jhpoelen/ex itnode) were able to tunnel and mesh through the "test" exit node using <http s://github.com/jhpoelen/exitnode/#configure-home-node-to-use-exit- node>. ttps://github.com/sudomesh/bugs/issues/8  sorts that helps to build a PON-like network from scratch. works and for troubleshooting. Other folks can use it as a example of how to build a mesh network with VPN-like tunneling. going, you can always (temporarily) create your own . . .  (PON) has been malfunctioning for about a week now, causing the network from behaving properly.  /issues/8 and are trying to reproduce the issue in an isolated environment. This involves setting up an exit node from scratch.  learning as I go, trying to document my progress in reproducible setup scripts at https://github.com/jhpoelen/exitnode . If this leads to anything, I am hoping we can consolidate this with the existing (outdated) documentation and incorporate into our growing collection of guides. reach out to me or any other member familiar with the setup. and bolts) about how PON works is probably more important than PON itself.