Things to do in DN42

What can you do in DN42 ? Ultimately, you’ll get out of DN42 what you put in to it, but I’ve listed here a few ideas that may serve as inspiration and the spark an idea.

This is deliberately not a set of instructions or a guide and it’s not a checklist of stuff you must do.
If you are interested in something there is plenty of public information available on all these topics.

• Read up on how Internet peering works, and the tools and protocols that are used
• Register your details in the DN42 registry
  • Do read the DN42 getting started guide
  • Do browse through the registry itself and use what other people did as examples
  • Do look through recent Pull Requests to see what is required and how to do it
• Join the mailing list and #dn42 on hackint
  • DN42 is a great community with many knowledgable members. You can learn a lot from what other people are doing, or the problems they have, as well as getting your own network working
• Get your first peer
  • use the peerfinder to find peers close to you, or ask on IRC
• ping something on DN42
• use a DN42 service

Congratulations, you’re connected to DN42 !

• Get more peers
  • Add 4 or 5 different peers
    • having several peers prevents having a dependency on a single peer and adds redundancy
    • provides you with a variety of different routes
    • learn how different peers manage their networks
• How do you see which routes are being advertised and selected ?
  • Change route metrics and see how this influences selected routes
  • Optimise your routes across your peers
  • What is an optimal route anyway ?
• How is your network being distributed across DN42 ?
  • How do you find out ?
  • Change how your routes are advertised to peers to influence the routing to your network across DN42
• Set up DNS and resolve a host in the .dn42 hierarchy
• Set up your own DNS server
  • Register a domain; set up forward and reverse DNS
• Set up a blog/wiki and document your network
  • Make the pages available over DN42 and the Internet
• Add your network to the peerfinder
• Learn something new and add it to the DN42 Wiki

• Secure your network
• Distribute DN42 routes to another, internal node
  • Learn how to use an IGP and iBGP
• Add two or more nodes to DN42 and peer with multiple AS
  • Distribute routes from all peers across the nodes in your network
• How do you decide which routes are ‘best’ across the network ?
  • Optimise your routes to DN42
• How do you manage multiple entry points to your network ?
  • What do other networks see ?
  • How do other networks decide which node to route to ?
• Configure your network so that one node is preferred
  • Optimise how DN42 sees your network
• Add two or more nodes in different continents
  • Why is that different ?
  • How do you optimise your network now ?
• Implement ROA
• Implement BGP communities
• Help a new joiner connect to DN42
• Resolve someone elses DN42 problem
• Set up a looking glass
• Set up a service that can be used by the rest of the DN42 community
  • Make it a ‘production’ service, add HA, monitoring and alerting
  • Secure your service
  • Use the DN42 CA
  • Add it to the wiki

• Isolate your network
  • Using VRFs
  • Using Namespaces
• Connect multiple nodes to the same peer AS in different geographic locations
  • Optimise the routes to the AS
  • Optimise the routes that the peer AS has to you
• Monitor your network
  • How do you know it’s working well ?
  • (what does ‘working well’ mean ?)
  • provide public metrics
• Create a virtual environmment to test changes
  • How do you make your virtual environment representative of DN42 ?
• Volunteer to help with DN42 core services
• System administration and automation
  • Patching and maintenance
  • Implement backups and DR
  • Automate the set up and configuration of your nodes
  • Automate adding peers

• Make something new
  • What’s the latest software or network trend ?
  • implement it and learn how to use it
• Make something experimental
  • Try out a cutting edge service or network technology and see if you can get it to work
  • What are the current challenges faced by the Internet ? How are they being solved ?
  • Can you replicate the problem and potential solutions in DN42 ?
• Make something social
  • Create and share a community resource
• Make something stable
  • Fine tune your network and nodes
  • DN42 changes all the time, how do you protect your network from other people breaking things ?
• Make something small
  • Take something huge (DNS, CDNs, gmail, distributed computing, serverless, AI …) and shrink it down to your network, but using the same techniques as the global players to manage things
    • scale it up, and down
• Make something corporate
  • Replicate a multi-datacentre corporate/organisation design
  • Grab your next job based on your experience ;)
• Make it all again
  • There’s more than one way to do it; rebuild your network using a different design
  • How can you rebuild everything whilst minising the impact to everyone else ?
  • What did you learn ? What works better now ? What is worse ?
  • How can you do it again better next time ?

What can you do in DN42 ?

• Do whatever is fun and interesting for you