re6stnet 0.431

Resilient, Scalable, IPv6 Network

Contents

• re6stnet

  • Overview

  • HOW IT WORKS

    • Resilience

    • Scalability

  • Requirements

  • Installation

  • Change History

re6stnet

Resilient, Scalable, IPv6 Network application

Author:

Nexedi <[e-mail]>

Overview

re6stnet creates a resilient, scalable, ipv6 network on top of an existing ipv4 network, by creating tunnels on the fly, and then routing targeted traffic through these tunnels.

re6stnet can be used to:

• guarantee connectedness between computers connected to the internet, for which there exists a working route (in case the direct route isn’t available).

• create large networks

• give ipv6 addresses to machines with only ipv4 available

HOW IT WORKS

A re6stnet network consists of at least one server (re6st-registry) and many nodes (re6stnet). The server is only used to deliver certificates for secure authentification in establishing tunnels, and to bootstrap new nodes. re6stnet can detect and take into account nodes present on the local network.

Resilience

re6stnet guarantees that if there exists a route between two machines, traffic will be correctly routed between these two machines. Even if the registry node is down, the probability that the network isn’t connected is very low for big enough networks (more than a hundred nodes).

Scalability

Since each node has very few data about the network, re6stnet is easily scalable to tens of thousand of nodes

Requirements

• Python 2.6 or 2.7

• OpenSSL binary and development libraries

• OpenVPN

• Babel (with Nexedi patches)

• python-miniupnpc for UPnP support (optional)

• for the demo: miniupnpd, Graphviz, Screen, Nemu

See also setup.py for Python dependencies.

Installation

re6stnet is distributed as a Python egg, and is also packaged for DEB & RPM based distributions:

See re6st-registry to set up a re6st network and re6st-conf to join an existing network.

On Debian Squeeze, you will have to install babeld package from Wheezy.

In order to build DEB snapshot package whose version is derived from current Git revision, the debian/changelog file must be generated automatically, that’s why you can’t use dpkg-buildpackage directly: run debian/rules instead. RPM does not have this limitation: do rpmbuild -bb re6stnet.spec` as usual.

Change History

0.1 (2012-09-06)

Initial release.

Git Revision: 0.431 == 285c7ae