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The Plan:

Butchering the vocabulary in order to accomodate my thoughts for now. Subject to intense change until I lose interest on Thursday, probably.

Build a local meshnet with useful services that do not require the internet.

  1. Build my personal home/lab net out to cover the entire span of my neighborhood by purchasing 1 MT7688 router dev board a month until I am out of film canisters.
  2. Transparently connect to residential PC’s using the same URL/Domain everywhere. Preferably human-readable and doing authentication at another layer.
  3. Allow others to use my infrastructure to set up their own networks and optionally make them available on the mesh.

Why Today? Well, KRACK maybe was the immediate impetus. But more broadly, I want to put in place a policy for deploying services I wish to keep available to me on my network, and a procedure for updating and or rebooting the network.

Guides:

Services:

Services Goals:

Service Requirements:

Required for all routers except Repeaters and Spoofers:

Recommended for all routers except Repeaters and Spoofers:

Policies:

Policy Goals

Informal Policy / Genesis of the Plan:

Before I continue, the whole purpose of this policy is to make it possible for me to do ill-advised things with my own network without disrupting my room mates ability to use it.

For most of my adult life, I’ve gone to pretty great lengths to avoid disrupting the internet service available to my room mates. Even when I pay for it. Part of that means that I can’t experiment on the router unless I have a backup, which means that in order to even start customizing one router, I have to have another router ready to drop in in such a way that they won’t notice. Which requires at least 2 routers to accomplish. This is good enough to make it work, but a little limiting. So as soon as it was possible, I started a 3 router basic configuration, wherin the third router is called the Lab Router and is especially required to be readily recovered in the event of a brick, and am devising an optional, broader, fourth configuration for expanding the network using hardware I don’t integrate here with the intention of expanding the network both wired and wirelessly. I don’t plan to enforce any aspect of this on anyone else’s devices should they choose to participate in the meshnet.

  1. Home Router: This is the router that connects to the modem, and which is used to share the residential internet connection. This router is kept “Stable” which here means that it gets updates that are built only from official sources with isolated toolchains to avoid library interference, and only recieves customizations from selfhosted repositories, and not from packages built into the firmware image. In my lab, this is a Netgear wndr3800.
  2. Backup/Spoofer Router: This one is manually configured to have identical settings to Home Router in a known good configuration, so that it can take the place of Home Router if it’s down for maintenance. It only runs a stock version of lede with no third-party packages, even if they’re included on the Home Router, in order to make as absolutely sure as possible that this router will always boot. In my lab, this is a pre-configured WNDR2000, which is the same router that suffered the 4 ⁄ 32 defect. Being the spoofer is about the only thing it’s still useful for in this setup.
  3. Lab Router: This router only connects my personal devices to the Home Router network, and provides some additional capabilites by running it’s own services. It also serves as a testing area for strategies and changes that will be migrated to the Home Router. In my lab, this is the role of the Onion Omega2.
  4. + Mesh Routers/Mesh Servicers:
    • Servicer: A servicer is a device which does at least 2 things: Host an outward-facing service and share it’s wider network connection in any way. An example might be an old laptop running apt-cacher-ng, plugged into a Home Router, and serving up an access point. These devices can run any Linux based operating system, including those which mix in non-free software.
    • Mesher: A mesher is a device which both recieves a network connection and shares it with nearby devices, and which does both of these things wirelessly. This must be running LEDE, LibreCMC, Debian, or Alpine Linux.
    • Repeater: Repeaters are devices which are used in the same way as a Mesher, but which for whatever reason cannot qualify as meshers. These are things like the secondhand Belkin N600 I set up with DD-WRT in the garage.

So the other day I went and purchase an Onion Omega2+ gadget and the mini power adapter to use as a new laboratory router, since my old one was having issues due to the 4 ⁄ 32 problem. I was mostly not disappointed! Which is a big deal for me, I am prone to extreme dissatisfaction. This little gadget is insanely easy to use. That’s not to say it doesn’t have a few rough edges, I found getting the wireless to work with stock LEDE a little confusing, but it’s a nice little device and appealingly, it generates almost no heat and fits comfortably within a film canister. Perhaps even more appealingly, the little guy is like 12 USD without the power adapter. And there’s another company with an almost identical product called Seeed Studio which is about 14 USD retail, and it comes with power over usb built right in! And for a travel router, this thing has quite a bit of capability.

formerly my lede-docker Dockerfiles repository

Get the source code:
I2P