PACKET updates 8/8/06

Well, it's been while since I've made any updates.  But I have been making
some changes to the packet station recently.  The main change is I finally
upgraded my old dinsoaur Redhat 6.2 Linux packet setup to Fedora Core 5.
The programmers have been working on the Linux Kernel ax25 lately, 
some of them can be found on irc at irc.freenode.net/#hamradio.  It seems
to be basically fine.   Upgrading this server was a big job and required
re-installing f6fbb BBS software and changing to the new 'user mode' 
soundmodem driver, rather than the kernel mode sound driver.

If anyone is considering going to Fedora Core 5 right now, I think mostly
the software worked and still compiled.  One bugaboo is that there's a special
patch for f6fbb for the newer kernels.  I don't remember where this is,
but if you ask on the xfbbd email list, someone else will remember.  Maybe
soon, this patch will not be needed.  Also I upgraded to saupp convers server,
which allows me to use the convers chat system with an irc client.  Kind of
nice actually and I've been using this feature.

Turns out that someone long ago, some genius, managed to get an entire A-net
for ham radio.  Ham radio has the  ip range of 44.0.0.0-44.255.255.255
assigned to it.  Pretty generous collection of IP's.  A few years back
when w6yx was running a gateway I was answering ke6i.ampr.org and
vhf.ke6i.ampr.org here, but sadly, the w6yx gateway went down.  In any case,
I thought it would be nice to bring these ip's back to life here.  Also when
I'm visiting other ham tcp/ip sites, it is nice to use another 44.xx.xx.xx
ip -- since it is often assumed this is a ham radio licensed machine then.

So the new system handles the ampr.org ip addresses.  My main ham radio machine
is now at ke6i.ampr.org or 44.4.92.50, which is the ham radio IP address range.
If you visit http://ke6i.ampr.org you should find a mini-page of packet stuff.
Getting this up and running had a few hiccups.   Basically there's an email
robot at www.fuller.net.  If you send the commands to this email robot, it'll
assign your ampr.org ip address to your 'regular ip' address.  This was
relatively straight forwards.  I think the only hiccup I had was that I
had to put the subnet commands on one line, rather than multiple subnet
subnet commands.  (THis will make sense if you try activating a 44.xx.xx.xx 
address.)  Once with the robot gateway set, packets starting coming
in addressed to 44.4.92.50 in here at this ip.  

The problem is the other direction.  Turns out that normally you are supposed
to be able to send out packets from a 44.xx.xx.xx address and they can just
go out on the internet.  But something is filtering them out.  Maybe my 
router? I'm not sure to be honest.  

There's a nice script at

http://ww2.n1uro.com/cgi-bin/safe-config.cgi

This is by n1uro and it allowed me to foward my 44.xx.xx.xx packets to 
another system, graciously donated, and onto the internet.  It spits out
some commands to do this, and I thought I was going to try to figure this
out from man pages, but the iptables commands were just strange.  This
saved me a lot of work picking away at this.

Also I'm downloading a file called 'encap.txt' -- this sets static routes
for all 44.xx.xx.xx addresses and allows me to make direct connections
to them without burdening the systems that handle routing for the 44.xx.xx.xx
address range.   There's a script -- tunnel-munge to process this file
to Linux commands and with a little bit of poking I managed to make it 
work on my system.  I updated this script to use the /sbin/ip command
rather than /sbin/route.  

In the end, I think my plan for ke6i.ampr.org as a website is to use
it for direct information about the packet system.  Maybe I'll put more
comments there, or expose more information.