About non 24/7 tunnelbrokers

[Pim van Pelt]

<about a tunnelbroker client/server application>
> 
> One solution I had thought of was to regularly ping the end
> point and shut down the tunnel if there were no replies in a
> while.
> 
I have esthetical objections to this. You are sending potentially
random users proto-41 traffic. Many users I see at Freeler (a 550k
users Dutch ISP where I am IP consultant) run (windows..) protection
agents which complain about unwanted traffic. You can imagine some
of these users sending abuse mail to Freeler that they are being
probed, hacked, etc etc by your tunnelbroker.

> > Of course, I'd like to hear from any admin that has a
> > tunnelbroker, or has a need for one. I have implemented
> > the above schema on tunnelserver.ipng.nl:6660 (no this is
> > not IRC)
> 
> Sounds good, but this requires the user to have a program
> that replies to the PINGs, do you provide that?
Well, someone wrote a perl script that does exactly this. It
logs on, sets the tunnel and plays ping/pong with the server
as long as the connection is up. Before it goes down, one sends
sigHUP to the script, and it gracefully shuts down the tunnel
and logs off. If it doesn't the server will do so after a ping
timeout.

Of course, a C/C++, Perl, TCL or other equivalent are all
equally trivial to write. Mine happens to be perl due to that
user's preference for Perl code: sitc.pl by Wim Vandersmissen.

Perhaps I should make this program portable (currently it uses
some Linux specific code) and release it to the public.

Anyone interrested ? Recapitulating, it's a tunnelbroker with
support of dynamic tunnels which shutdown automatically when
the user is not online. Client and Server both available.

groet,
Pim van Pelt
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Pim van Pelt                 Email: pim@ipng.nl
http://www.ipng.nl/             IPv6 Deployment
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