mentalsmash/uno repository overview

⁠uno

uno⁠ is a tool for linking multiple LANs into a single routing domain over the public Internet.

LANs are interconnected by agent nodes which act as gateways to other LANs. The agent nodes establish redudant VPN links between them to carry out the BGP protocol⁠ and find routes to every other LAN.

Beside implementing the routing "backbone", each agent node also exposes a VPN port to allow authorized mobile peers to access the unified routing domain, and route all their traffic through the VPN link.

uno refers to this unified routing domain as a unified virtual network or UVN for short. The UVN is composed of cells (a.k.a. agent nodes), particles (a.k.a. mobile peers), and at least one user (the UVN's owner).

The UVN's configuration is defined in a centralized registry, which provides cell agent packages to be copied onto each agent host. The packages contain all artifacts required to deploy the UVN services on the host, and instantiate its cell.

The registry also contains a particle package for every particle, providing ready-to-use VPN configurations to connect as that particle to any one of the cells with an active particle VPN port.

uno supports dynamic reconfiguration of the UVN, which can be updated in the registry and either pushed to cells with a publicly reachable address, or pulled by cells deployed behind a NAT (in this case the registry must be deployed behind a public address). This feature is optional, and uno can still be used to create entirely static deployments.

Dynamic reconfiguration requires the deployment of an agent process on each cell. The agents will listen for connections from the registry, and they will also disseminate status information between them. Each agent provides a status overview through a web inteface, which can be accessed from anywhere within the UVN.

All VPN links are provisioned using WireGuard⁠, while the frrouting⁠ suite is used to implement BGP routing.

The agents use RTI Connext DDS⁠ to communicate between them, and to exchange configuration updates with the registry. A license file is required to use these features, and it can be requrested for free from RTI⁠.

The following diagram shows an example of a UVN interconnecting four LANs with a cell in each LAN, and several particles connecting to them. All cells in this example are reachable through a public address.

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