Title. Just imagine the possibilities of having your own “homemade internet”!
Use an overlay network and run dns on it.
That’s called an intranet (which is like the internet but for a building or small area).
The internet isn’t really anything more than computers connected to other computers. If you want to make your own internet you can connect two computers whether wired or wireless, and voila. You can host a website locally that only those two computers can access.
See also: !selfhosting@slrpnk.net
You can even set up your own DNS and create your own domain names for said websites.
I know this isn’t what is being asked, but has any of us considered a crowd network where independent users mesh? I would say that I would not want the mesh to meet the www due to endpoint abuse, but to have an independent can/man could be pretty rad.
I mean you could have an open wifi mesh and/or a network of either cheap fibre/ethernet with open switches. Then using OSPF or a similar routing protocol that supports routing over LAN networks you could handle the routing between all the remote networks.
I think you’d need to break the network up at some points to break down the broadcast domains. You could do a similar thing to defederating, by not accepting certain routes, or routes from certain OSPF nodes.
Issues with LANs that get too big without splitting into a new LAN (limiting broadcast domains) and definitely even the most modern wifi becomes problematic with a number of active stations online (wifi is half duplex in operation). So multiple channels and some backbone either over point to point radio links, or cable to connect wifi zones and alternate channels would improve things somewhat.
Not sure why you’d want to do something like this. But the tech to do it is fairly inexpensive.
Not sure exactly what I would do with it either. It’s not meant for illegal activity, but I can see it being used they way. Properly secured it could be another dark web.
I thought about it needing some kind of border protocol to manage locations and routes. One would need to come up with an address and probably a certificate.
Regarding physical connections, I would say it’s easiest to use wireless. I personally wouldn’t want to advertise that my location is my network, so like the onion network I would like it to route away and double back.
The problem with wifi is that things will go downhill quickly once you have too many stations online. Even if they’re not actively browsing, the normal amount of chatter that a network has will often just slow things right down. It would need to be split into smaller wifi networks linked somehow and that means someone needs to be in a central location that is easily traced.
In theory I guess someone with a very fast connection could run a layer 2 VPN. Then you could all run a routing protocol over that network which is accessed over the internet.
Lot’s of ways to do it really. Wifi alone is probably the worst though.