rns.recipes

I keep finding huge bugs in BeechatNetworkSystems's Rust reticulum implementation. I've been experimenting with using it as a backend for a public interface, however keep running into issues.

I've fixed one major issue, and "helped" another moderate one... but haven't gotten much of a response from them.

• https://github.com/BeechatNetworkSystemsLtd/Reticulum-rs/issues/95
• https://github.com/BeechatNetworkSystemsLtd/Reticulum-rs/issues/92

Just tossing this out there. The code is pretty solid, and just needs a little love... but it seems like so far Beechat Network Systems is no longer reviewing PRs?

There is some work being done on one of the branches to be fair https://github.com/BeechatNetworkSystemsLtd/Reticulum-rs/tree/channel after no commits for a while, so I think the devs are just intermittently checking and updating stuff cause it's just not that popular yet.

Alternative ("yet another Rust port"): https://github.com/ratspeak/rsReticulum

kallisti5 wrote:

I keep finding huge bugs in BeechatNetworkSystems's Rust reticulum implementation. I've been experimenting with using it as a backend for a public interface, however keep running into issues.

I've fixed one major issue, and "helped" another moderate one... but haven't gotten much of a response from them.

• https://github.com/BeechatNetworkSystemsLtd/Reticulum-rs/issues/95
• https://github.com/BeechatNetworkSystemsLtd/Reticulum-rs/issues/92

Just tossing this out there. The code is pretty solid, and just needs a little love... but it seems like so far Beechat Network Systems is no longer reviewing PRs?

I came to the same conclusion as you; my read is that they ported enough for their drone/kaonic stuff needs and just have little incentive to push on a really complete parity implementation (no shade, that's how it goes sometimes). There are definitely other Rust efforts that seem more committed to a true parity impl

I spent the afternoon just working on my fork of it :'-) Added support for rnstransport.probes (aka respond_to_probes).

• https://github.com/GhostMeshLabs/reticulum-rs

My Reticulum router using the library (functional!)

• https://github.com/GhostMeshLabs/reticulum-router

I love reticulum and the design, but the way the Python code was designed has always been the "eew" factor.

kallisti5 wrote:

I spent the afternoon just working on my fork of it :'-) Added support for rnstransport.probes (aka respond_to_probes).

• https://github.com/GhostMeshLabs/reticulum-rs

My Reticulum router using the library (functional!)

• https://github.com/GhostMeshLabs/reticulum-router

I love reticulum and the design, but the way the Python code was designed has always been the "eew" factor.

Seeing the journey and how it all got here, I really do think Python was absolutely the right tool for the job. It's easy in retrospect to see how clear it is now, but that's only because that reference impl exists; and there's a very good chance it never would have existed if a systems lang was used from the beginning.

BUt more importantly, the ecosystem definitely welcomes other implementations! It's a little chaotic and fragmented right now, but that's only because there's actually a lot of deep interest, and the system is so good it holds its own, so I think people see the very deep value in it. Good problems to have, basically.

quick q: are you trying to push toward a fully usable Rust impl, or was a lot of this in part the joy and intrigue of contributing? (i have a specific reason I'm asking, I promise haha)

KenAKAFrosty wrote:

quick q: are you trying to push toward a fully usable Rust impl, or was a lot of this in part the joy and intrigue of contributing? (i have a specific reason I'm asking, I promise haha)

Yup! I want a small, usable Rust implementation. I really do think Reticulum implemented within a compiled language like Rust will help it take off.

I agree wholeheartedly about the Python implementation being a great proving ground for Reticulum as an idea.. but i'm not a fan of how it transformed into a monolith. Things can get confusing quick when you mix in MeshChat, RNode interfaces, etc.

Update: I just implemented TCPServerInterface discoverability within reticulum-router :-)

also, I just had a revelation that it would be pretty easy to attack Reticulum as it stands. It wouldn't take much to:

• Rapidly generate random identities
• Rapidly broadcast discovery packets with random bind_host / bind_ports / names

I just tossed this out into the ether without any real checks on receiving clients from reticulum-router...

[[Local]]
type = BackboneInterface
enabled = yes
remote = 0.0.0.0
target_port = 4242
transport_identity = 82bbad92048a9e5c05a58a27cfbeddb9

https://rns.wirebase.org/?selected=82bbad92048a9e5c05a58a27cfbeddb9

Anyway... The experimental Rust Reticulum node is at e41accf45983432cf5c9ee667bd1e77f and announcing. Feel free to use it! (or try and break it)

kallisti5 wrote:

also, I just had a revelation that it would be pretty easy to attack Reticulum as it stands. It wouldn't take much to:

• Rapidly generate random identities
• Rapidly broadcast discovery packets with random bind_host / bind_ports / names

I just tossed this out into the ether without any real checks on receiving clients from reticulum-router...

[[Local]]
type = BackboneInterface
enabled = yes
remote = 0.0.0.0
target_port = 4242
transport_identity = 82bbad92048a9e5c05a58a27cfbeddb9

https://rns.wirebase.org/?selected=82bbad92048a9e5c05a58a27cfbeddb9

This is pretty much the reason for announcements being cap to 2% of the traffic but it's not that great of a solution, you might not brick the entire network but anyone trying to connect for the first time in your local area might be screwed for a bit while you are spamming. Announcements are kinda the riskiest thing in reticulum because of the flood filling, I could imagine that they might require some kind of proof of work similar to how interface announcements work today or some other more clever solutions (if a transport node is getting 150 new announcements per second from one backbone interface client, maybe it's best to rate limit them)

There is rate limiting in place. https://reticulum.miraheze.org/wiki/Announce#Rate_limiting

I believe this is what shows up as held announces in rnstatus.

joakim wrote:

There is rate limiting in place. https://reticulum.miraheze.org/wiki/Announce#Rate_limiting

I believe this is what shows up as held announces in rnstatus.

Ah ok, I had the realization late last night but didn't dig into it too far. I also just confirmed the BeeChatNetworkSystems implementation already has the Announce limit implemented

kallisti5 wrote:

KenAKAFrosty wrote:
> quick q: are you trying to push toward a fully usable Rust impl, or was a lot of this in part the joy and intrigue of contributing? (i have a specific reason I'm asking, I promise haha)

Yup! I want a small, usable Rust implementation. I really do think Reticulum implemented within a compiled language like Rust will help it take off.

I agree wholeheartedly about the Python implementation being a great proving ground for Reticulum as an idea.. but i'm not a fan of how it transformed into a monolith. Things can get confusing quick when you mix in MeshChat, RNode interfaces, etc.

Update: I just implemented TCPServerInterface discoverability within reticulum-router :-)

Ok gotcha! For clarity though, what do you mean by small, here? (it's a bit oblique, but I'm gathering you might be actually thinking more perf-focused? some of the other stuff you've mentioned like stress testing etc. gives me that impression)

Ok! I've addressed all of the major bugs in the BeeChatNetworkSystems's Rust implementation. I've been chatting single-hop through it successfully and even did an audio call!

No response yet at all from BeeChatNetworkSystems in any of the PR's or bugs :-| I'm really trying to upstream these major fixes, but have gotten silence so far from them.

Version v1.0.0 is out now and deployed. Lets see if the reliability score increases
https://rns.wirebase.org/?mode=all&q=GhostMesh

For clarification's sake (because I don't know where else to find the answer), is there any way for the crate to hook onto an already running rnsd process similar to how nomadnet does and use the same identities, or must you create a local port to link the two reticulum instances and create your own identities independent of any other reticulum processes that you may be already running.

welo wrote:

For clarification's sake (because I don't know where else to find the answer), is there any way for the crate to hook onto an already running rnsd process similar to how nomadnet does and use the same identities, or must you create a local port to link the two reticulum instances and create your own identities independent of any other reticulum processes that you may be already running.

I'm not 100% sure but I don't think so, unfortunately. Good news is if you're looking for a good Rust port, I'm deep in the middle one that's specifically designed to be parity with the reference impl, period.

Plus I'm building it completely determinstic and no_std (alloc-free, no less). All kinds of nice benefits are falling out of this, one of which is getting full faithful self-contained Reticulum nodes on these boards. Here's my Heltec V4 wired up with RNode-compatible LoRa, full auto-interface for local wifi, and an auto-managed USB interface as well.

Will try and keep y'all posted once it's ready for public eyes (ETA a few weeks from now)

All joking aside, yea one implementation that could be used from anything from micro controllers transport nodes to just creating normal applications ontop of reticulum would be nice it shares all the internal logic for the most part so yes this would be helpful, so, good luck.

Only I can give my opinion on is that it might be best to have a crate with just the completely agnostic code such as like interface traits or the main transport logic and have that in some reticulum-core that could be used for anything and then have an additional crate with additional functionality that is dependent on what device you are on such as TcpClient or Lora pins or interfacing with the operating system if are on one or whatever.

Also if you are using async (which I'm guessing you should be?), make the runtime a choice so micro controllers can use something like embassy and then regular computers can use tokio so the same code works on nicely on both.

welo wrote:

[image]

All joking aside, yea one implementation that could be used from anything from micro controllers transport nodes to just creating normal applications ontop of reticulum would be nice it shares all the internal logic for the most part so yes this would be helpful, so, good luck.

Only I can give my opinion on is that it might be best to have a crate with just the completely agnostic code such as like interface traits or the main transport logic and have that in some reticulum-core that could be used for anything and then have an additional crate with additional functionality that is dependent on what device you are on such as TcpClient or Lora pins or interfacing with the operating system if are on one or whatever.

Also if you are using async (which I'm guessing you should be?), make the runtime a choice so micro controllers can use something like embassy and then regular computers can use tokio so the same code works on nicely on both.

Hahaha, a classic!!!

And see, what you suggested is exactly what seemed lacking so far. There wasn't any port out there anywhere close to that.

the core is indeed an agnostic engine.
[EDIT: in here I described internals of how the engine work, but it's changed dramatically since this post, so I removed that to avoid confusion]

The core engine approach also lets us sleep in between instead of having to poll&tick on some cadence: we know the entire engine state including the soonest upcoming scheduled item, from maintenance to an annnounce rebroadcast, whatever it might be. So we can just wait on a race of that vs an incoming packet. Not only a nice embedded story, but even just being a little friendlier to the battery on mobile devices and laptops.

Not to mention the benefit of how it can resume from whereever it was left off, especially in mobile dev this could be extremely helpful since the app can get backgrounded despite your best efforts. Plus it lets us run multi-node simulations where we can pause and go tick by tick and see how data flows, what happens. Great for learning and debugging

anyway, thanks for letting me ramble about it for a bit! It sounds like what you're looking for will be well taken care of with this, so stay tuned. exciting future ahead!!

Yea if it could (eventually) support more high level stuff like links, resources and hooking up to existing background rnsd then that sounds pretty good to me. I'm excited enough (you kinda implied that it higher level stuff will included cause you first responded to a message about me complaining/querying about that, I'm not actually certain after thinking about it; but a man can wish cause that'd be cool as shit).

This probably should be its own thread at this point cause we are a bit off track so just make one so people can stay tuned for it I suppose

welo wrote:

Yea if it could (eventually) support more high level stuff like links, resources and hooking up to existing background rnsd then that sounds pretty good to me. I'm excited enough (you kinda implied that it higher level stuff will included cause you first responded to a message about me complaining/querying about that, I'm not actually certain after thinking about it; but a man can wish cause that'd be cool as shit).

This probably should be its own thread at this point cause we are a bit off track so just make one so people can stay tuned for it I suppose

Oh yeah not only a high-level API for you to use in Rust code, but the same for kotlin,swift,and typescript (via uniffi & napi, respectively). Will make a new thread soon when ready. thanks for the discussion!