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/sudomesh/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/9843481/> .

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/sudomesh/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://github.com/sudomesh/tunneldigger/issues/8>.  
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:
Hey y'all -

We've made some progress today in troubleshooting the Peoples Open Network outage issue. 

I found the BYOI office hours today real useful to figure more of this exitnode stuff out, and run some tests. 

Here's some things that happened today:
1. Using a script "create_exitnode.sh", an exit node was creating on a digital ocean droplet in < 5min (see https://github.com/jhpoelen/exitnode)
2. At least three nodes (two at sudoroom and one at someones house) were able to tunnel and mesh through the "test" exit node using <https://github.com/jhpoelen/exitnode/#configure-home-node-to-use-exit-node>.
3. Shared results with exit.sudomesh.org operators Juul and Yar via https://github.com/sudomesh/bugs/issues/8 

Am hoping to bundle the steps to create an exitnode into a guide of sorts that helps to build a PON-like network from scratch.

I imagine we can use this guide internally for sharing how stuff works and for troubleshooting. Other folks can use it as a example of how to build a mesh network with VPN-like tunneling.

So, if you don't want to wait any longer for the exitnode to get going, you can always (temporarily) create your own . . . 

Curious to hear thoughts / comments, 

thx,
-jorrit

On Thu, 2018-02-08 at 16:22 -0800, Jorrit Poelen wrote:
Hey Everyone -

As you probably know, the exit node of the People's Open Network (PON) has been malfunctioning for about a week now, causing the network from behaving properly. 

We've been gathering evidence here https://github.com/sudomesh/bugs/issues/8 and are trying to reproduce the issue in an isolated environment. This involves setting up an exit node from scratch. 

I am making slow progress despite help from others because I am 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.

If you feel inspired to help with this, please don't hesitate to reach out to me or any other member familiar with the setup.

What I am learning from this is that sharing knowledge (incl. nuts and bolts) about how PON works is probably more important than PON itself.

-jorrit
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