17 Aug
2023
17 Aug
'23
3:02 p.m.
On Aug 16, 2023, at 11:21 PM, John H. Reinhardt
<johnhreinhardt(a)thereinhardts.org> wrote:
So Mark (Matlock) has been after me to get my HECnet connection up and running and me,
being an ace procrastinator, has always said "Real Soon Now™", Mark.
I might actually have time to do it as I'm on vacation for a week and a half.
Despite the heat I could set something up. My question is how do I set it up. I have a
Mac Mini in Las Vegas running VMWare ESXi. I have a VM (Aniketos) running Vyos for a
firewall/router, another VM with an Nginx web server (Hermes - irrelevant just mentioned
for completeness) and a really small (1 vCPU) Linux VM (Knight) which I want to run
Paul's PyDECnet router for the world to connect to. From there I have an IPSec VPN to
my Ubiquiti EdgeRouter 4 at home. How can I connect DECnet through the VPN to Knight from
home? Is it even possible? Do I need or want GRE tunnels through the VPN?
Am I just making it too complicated and should I set up a PyDECnet router at home and go
that way through my dynamic IP? It's possible I could set up an x86 OpenVMS machine as
another VM
I'm thinking I need a PyDECnet router at home to collect all the DECnet traffic and
shove it through the VPN to the PyDECnet router at the remote site and from there out into
the internet to it's HECnet connection points. Does that make sense?
A router at home that uses the dynamic IP address is certainly a valid option, one a bunch
of us use today.
I don't know that anyone has tried running a DECnet circuit through an IPSec VPN, but
clearly it should work. You'd just point the DECnet circuit to the IP address of the
other end of the tunnel, with the local address of the circuit set to the local endpoint
of the tunnel. Then you can use any IP based communication method that is enabled by the
filter rules of the VPN. For example, if the VPN allows any IP traffic, you could use
anything IP based, from GRE to Multinet to DDCMP. If you want to be more restrictive, you
could enable just the one protocol and port you want. For example, that could be TCP on
which you run Multinet, or TCP or UPD carrying DDCMP.
If you do go this VPN route it would be interesting to hear how it works for you,
especially if you run into problems.
paul