Big network, small devices

Benjamin Henrion bh at udev.org
Tue Apr 10 10:22:37 CEST 2012


On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 1:01 AM, Guus Sliepen <guus at tinc-vpn.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 05, 2012 at 07:29:55PM +0200, Ivan Vilata i Balaguer wrote:
>
>> I'm interested in using Tinc for building an overlay network on top of a
>> community network.  The overlay may consist of some hundreds of nodes,
>> and devices will most probably not be very powerful (Alix or
>> Commell-like or even less).  To make the overlay network topology
>> resemble the real one as much as possible, all nodes would ConnectTo all
>> other nodes.
>
> This is not necessary, you only need one (but better a few for redundancy)
> ConnectTo statements. Tinc will figure out how to communicate with all the
> other nodes by itself.
>
>> Has anyone worked with a Tinc setup similar to this one?  Do you thik
>> Tinc would scale up to a network with so many connections so as to still
>> be runnable in so low-powered hardware?
>
> ChaosVPN (a large VPN connecting lots of hackerspaces) currently has 131 nodes
> running tinc, and a lot of these are Fonera routers, which have much lower
> specs than Alix or Commell boards as far as I know.

Have you made some performance tests on the fonera?

I would not expect tinc to max out the capacity of the ethernet
interface, since it consumes already too much cpu on x86.

-- 
Benjamin Henrion <bhenrion at ffii.org>
FFII Brussels - +32-484-566109 - +32-2-3500762
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