Subject: [mdnsext] New participant from guifi.net Community Network and the Clommunity project

From: Javi Jiménez <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 14:05:50 +0200

Greetings,

Recently we got news about the WG in the mailing list of the Clommunity 
project [1] a project about building a cloud in a box for Community 
Networks. One subtask of the Clommunity project is related to the 
subject of the mdnsext mailing list. In the received message we were 
invited to participate in the current mailing list.

We'd like to present a project [2] (ddnsc) related to the pourpose of 
this working group, we're in the first developing stages of the project 
and it's an script which publishes DNS registers to a global DNS server 
using the 'nsupdate' program. At the moment it's possible to publish and 
browse services, we need to test and improve it. The work is related to 
GNU/Linux and the Avahi Zeroconf implementation.

We continue developing the idea, which is basically to publish the 
services of a Community Network in a DNS server reachable using an 
anycast address for all the distributed DNS servers, with the anycast 
address we can replicate the servers (we already replicate DNS servers 
in the CN using geographical zones), with the anycast we try to avoid 
the overloading of unique DNS servers. The services are in a particular 
subdomain, as for example 'guifi', and all the users could browse the 
services inside the Community Network.

Related to the script, have to say that security is a problem, because 
right now anyone is allowed to update the bind DNS registers 
(allow-update {any}; it's aimed for all the users who want to publish 
services), perhaps we need an ACL to only allow to publish (only) new 
services pointing to the IP which is sending the publication. Due that 
reaseon, we've not public DNS service yet, it's being worked only under 
a development environment.

We don't know if the linked code it could be useful but the linked 
project is part of current research.

The referred code is a result of various documents, meetings and working 
groups present in the references and covers it in part.

Personally I work for the "Fundació Privada per a la Xarxa Oberta, 
Lliure i Neutral guifi.net" [3] (guifi.net Foundation Network Common 
Open, Free and Neutral) Foundation about the guifi.net Community Network 
[4] with more than 22.000 nodes and we're participating in the 
Clommunity European project. I'm not representing but giving 
information, and with your permission, willing to participate in the 
mailing list discussing topics as best as I can.

Best Regards.

[1] http://clommunity-project.eu/
[2] https://github.com/javi-jimenez/ddnsc
[3] http://blogs.guifi.net/fundacio/
[4] http://guifi.net/ - English: http://guifi.net/en/node/38392

-- 
Javi Jiménez
Fundació Privada per a la Xarxa Oberta, Lliure i Neutral guifi.net