Networking and WiFi
April 17, 2006
IHC WiFi
My wife’s having some minor outpatient surgery done today, so I’ve been at the hospital, waiting… To my pleasant surprise, I found that they have a public WiFi hotspot. They seem to be blocking quite a few ports, which is odd since I assume this is outside their firewall. But hey, I’ll take what I can get.
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February 09, 2006
Switching to Vonage
 Home patch panel (click to enlarge) |
Today was the day I finally made the break with Qwest. I’ve been paying twice what I would for Vonage’s best service and not getting as many features. I’ve had Vonage as my business line for a few years now and have been happy with it so I decided I’d transfer the main number to Vonage as well and say goodbye to my ILEC.
I get my broadband access from Comcast and it’s been pretty reliable. The few problems I’ve had have been DNS and that doesn’t affect VoIP—it kept right on working. The other big concern is power outages, but I’ve got my stuff on UPS—although I’m not sure about Comcast.
I’ll let you know how the experiment goes.
A comment from Cid Dennis made me think I maybe ought to say something about what I did to hook it up. First, I went outside and disconnected the Qwest lines coming into the house (there’s an RJ11 jack in the box on the side of the house) so that i wouldn’t be feeding any phone calls out to their network. Then I hooked an RJ11 jack to some phone wire and fed it straight into the punch down block that feeds my home patch panel (the punch down blocks in the lower left corner of the photo). If you don’t have a punch down block of some sort, your phone lines are probably daisy chained. In that case, feeding phone signal into any point in the daisy chain will light up all the phone jacks in the house.
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September 16, 2005
Asterisk to the Rescue
Randy Gordon pointed out some volunteer efforts to set up wireless and VoIP networks in shelters for people displaced by Katrina. The Atlanta Asterisk User’s Group is setting up Asterisk PBXs. Part15 is setting up wireless networks. Another example of private, volunteer rescue efforts.
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August 05, 2005
PlaceSite: Making HotSpots Social
I stopped by a demo by Sean Savage this morning on PlaceSite, a system for letting people share information (like who they are, where they are, etc.) locally over Wi-Fi hotspots. Say you’re in a coffee shop in downtown Salt Lake and it has a PlaceSite installed, when you open up your browser, you see not only who’s there, but even who’s close-by. It seems well designed and it’s open source. Sean and two of his friends (Damon McCormick and Jon Snydal) built it as a part of a MS project at Berkeley this year.
PlaceSite is built on top of the OpenWRT project that I covered at the last ETech. Consequently, you don’t need a server, just a Linksys WRT54G wireless router to run PlaceSite. That’s a big plus.
Scott Lemon and I have discussed this kind of idea before for community service announcements, local advertising, etc. Here’s a platform you build on Scott.
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July 05, 2005
Florida Man Charged with Wi-Fi Theft
A St. Petersburg Florida man has been charged with unauthorized access to a computer network, a third-degree felony after he was caught using the Wi-Fi connection outside a 28-year old veterinarian’s home.
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June 29, 2005
Grokking Grokster
Doc Searls has a very thorough and thoughtful commentary on the Grokster ruling at IT Garage.
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June 28, 2005
Free Mobile Calls to Anywhere in the World
The latest Cringely has some interesting analysis about why Adobe bought Macromedia, but skip past all that an read the part in the middle about ipDrum:
Mobile Skype Cable and comes from a Norwegian company called IPDrum (or will come when it ships in August). The cable connects a mobile phone to your computer. The illustrations all show one phone and one computer, but the power of the system can only be realized if you have at least two phones.
One phone stays at your PC as the interconnect with Skype. I’m hoping the cable also charges the phone, but that, again, isn’t made clear. In the simplest case you could probably pick up the phone and use it as a dedicated handset to speak over the Skype network. But the true power of the Mobile Skype Cable comes from having multiple phones and some kind of family billing plan.
I’m a Verizon mobile user and so is Mrs. Cringely. Our Verizon plan allows unlimited calls between our two phones. Now imagine one of those phones (or a third, they cost $9.99 per month each here in Charleston) is attached to a PC back at our house. By calling that phone and using the IPDrum software that ships with the Mobile Skype Cable, I can be linked directly to Skype where I can dial a second call over the computer network. Since the mobile call is free and the Skype call is free, suddenly I can make unlimited mobile calls anywhere in the world. Even more powerful, by linking my Skype and mobile numbers through the IPDrum software, any Skype user anywhere in the world can call me for free.From PBS | I, Cringely . June 23, 2005 - No Flash in the Pan
Referenced Tue Jun 28 2005 10:23:46 GMT-0600 (MDT)
But, of course, ipDrum is just software and it’s not magic. You could imagine other software that connects a cell phone by your PC to your Vonage account as well as your Skype account, for example. Scott Lemon’s been working to use a cell phone with an unlimited SMS messaging account as a way for a PC to send SMS messages. Walled gardens have weak walls anymore.
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May 14, 2005
Apple Dashboard and Connectivity
I’ve been gone the last week. I was on staff at a Woodbadge Training course. For those of you not familiar with Woodbadge, it’s an adult leadership training course run by the Boy Scouts. Probably the best leadership training I’ve ever received and being on staff was a lot of fun—even with the four inches of rain that fell last week.
While I was away, I had very limited Internet connectivity and even less free time. Consequently, I didn’t post. I did have my Mac with me, however, and I’m running Tiger. One thing I noticed is that one of Tiger’s most hyped features, Dashboard, is really pretty boring without connectivity. Most of the widgets I like depend on information that they get from the Internet.
More and more I find that I can’t do much with my computer unless I’ve got a network as well. It’s not just things like email. Even when I write, I depend on the Internet as an information source. I use it for research and even as my dictionary and thesaurus. This is just another example of how Web services, with or without SOAP, is becoming a reality.
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April 19, 2005
Vint Cerf on Internet Challenges
Vint Cerf ponders a question while sporting his new Utah hat during the 2005 Organick lecture.
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I drove up to the Univ. of Utah this afternoon to hear this year’s Organick Lecture by Vint Cerf, one of the inventors of the Internet (I believe he and Al Gore were lab partners). Vint is currently Senior VP for Technology Strategy at MCI, Chairman of ICANN, and a recent winner of the ACM Turing Award.
Where is the science in CS? Here are places some with underlying theory:
- Automata theory (strong)
- Compiler and language theory (strong)
- Operating system design (weak) - we are vulnerable to how to make OS’s secure and they take too many resources trying to manage resources.
- Data structures (strong)
- Queuing theory (networks of queues) - strong theory, but too much of the network functionality has to be abstracted away before you can apply the theory.
- Animation and rendering (strong) - Vint has recently come to have a respect for the theory, physics, and mathematics hiding behind the artistry.
Networking is one area that he picks on as not having significant underlying theory. There are important principals, like layering, but much of the theory is shallow. Protocol design, as an example, doesn’t have much theory. There has been some work in formalizing protocols and their analysis, but it’s way too complex. Other examples of places where we need deep analytical elements are distributed algorithms and cooperating processes.
We know almost nothing about making programming more efficient and systems more secure and scalable. He characterizes our progress in programming efficiency as a “joke” compared to hardware.
Security (and here he’s really mostly talking about identity) works well in hierarchical organizations, but not elsewhere. The cost of authenticating individual users is one of the key factors. Hierarchical organizations can more efficiently issue IDs and perform authentications.
He mentions virtual machines as an intriguing notion because theoretically they can create safe execution environments for various applications. JVMs do this, as an example. One of the reasons that people went to single application servers (for example, a DNS server, a mail server, etc.) in the 90’s was to get safe execution environments and process independence. The falling cost of hardware made this possible. VMs allow the cost of creating a machine to fall more dramatically still.
Here are some potential trouble spots:
- Penetrable operating systems.
- Insecure networks
- Buggy servers
- Broken models of perimeter security
- Worms, virus, Trojan horses, keyboard and web page monitors
- Bluetooth security in mobiles
- SPAM, SPIM, and SPIT
- Phishing and Pharming
- IDN ambiguities and DNS hijacking
- Intellectual property problems
- Routing attacks with BGP routing
- Distributed denial of service
- Millions of zombies
- Insecure servers, laptops, desktops, mobiles, etc.
Worms have the potential to create resilient processes that run across multiple machines for business continuity. Vint notes that the first instance of a worm was at Xerox Park for precisely this purpose. Business processes could be broken up and run as worm-like agents on multiple machines.
Speaking of identity, Vint wishes that the original design of the Internet had required that each end point on the network be able to authenticate themselves to every other end point. He notes that public key cryptography was still four years in the future at that point and symmetric key encryption was too expensive.
He lists a few more challenges that remain:
- Identity theft
- Personal privacy
- Search algorithms
- Semantic networks (related to last point)
- Database sharing (genome and space data are examples)
- IPv6 deployment
- Layers of details such as the network management systems, DNS refactoring, provisioning
- Allocation policy development
- Networked scientific instruments (tele-operation)
Some policy challenges in the Internet environment:
- WSIS/WGIG - Internet governance
- ICANN vs. ITU
- International eCommerce - imagine an Amazon customer in Hong Kong, ordering from Amazon in the US. The book is sourced in South Africa, and shipped to Paris. Certain questions arise:
- dispute resolution
- online contracts (authenticity, legal framework)
- taxation policies
He calls out Creative Commons and iTunes and new, innovative models of solving content management challenges. He notes that the regulatory system we have today is broken because it’s based on the modality of the communication and the Internet is subsuming them all.
Interplanetary Internet: InterPlaNet (IPN). The flow control mechanism of TCP doesn’t work well when the latency goes to 40 minutes. What’s more, planets are in motion, so distances apart vary with time and thus latency varies with time. So do error rates. Some of these problems are like mobile networks.
IPN assumes that you can use TCP/IP on the surface of the planet. Each planet has its own IP space demarked by a separate identifier. DNS doesn’t work on an interplanetary scale since by the time you get a resolution for an earth DNS address from Mars, the IP number may have changed (think mobile or DHCP). The protocol looks more like a store-and-forward email system than an end-to-end protocol like TCP. The result is an interplanetary network protocol.
At the end, someone asked about the proposal to have the UN take over ICANN duties. It was the only point in the talk where I’d say that Vint got animated and even a little worked up. He clearly feels strongly that “ICANN ain’t broke; don’t fix it.”
All in all, a very enjoyable talk. I’m glad that the U has the endowment and makes this happen each year. I took some additional photos, which you can see here.
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April 14, 2005
Comcast Outages
This Comcast outage is what I was talking about a week ago. The problems I was having before the two big blowouts were DNS because I could ping the Comcast gateway, but was getting about 50% packet loss to the DNS machines. So, the question I have is this: did Comcast know of the problems early on and just didn’t get them cleared up before they became massive or were my problems early warning signs of problems that hadn’t reached “get the story in c|net” proportions?
Somehow I think it was the latter. Comcast was unable to use the information they were getting from customers like me because they were focused on treating symptoms rather than root causes. Being able to get that information and understand it could have saved lots of customers the outage and Comcast the embarrassment.
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March 26, 2005
Neighbornode
Scott Lemon has been thinking about single purpose wi-fi networks for quite a while now. Today he sent me a link to Neighbornode, a special purpose wi-fi network in NY (mostly). A neighbornode is an electronic message board that serves everyone who can see it. In an area with dense housing, it creates a virtual community of the people who live near it. I like that its an example of a special purpose wi-fi network, but I also love that its a way to use technology to bring people in a community together.
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March 17, 2005
Remote Babysitting and Network Remixing
Nikolaj Nyholm, on Remixing the Network, tells the story of using Skype and Remote Desktop Connection to talk to his son while playing a game of Pippi Longstocking with him from thousands of miles away. He said it was a powerful experience. His talk is about how open bandwidth, open standards, and open source are allowing us to change what networking means.
Mass commoditization has also helped. A small Wi-Fi box, that costs $70, now has the equivalent processor of a $5000 Indy Workstation from 1995. Networking hardware is cheap and can be remixed in interesting ways. One such a box, the Linksys WRT54G, has a Linux distribution that runs on it: OpenWRT.
OpenWRT is a firmware replacement that allows you to build services on top of the WRT54G. The firmware core provides network initialization (ethernet and wireless), firewalling, DHCP client / server, caching DNS server (with hooks to DHCP to lookup DHCP client hostnames), and telnet server and busybox environment. “Everything else (ssh, HTTP administration, etc) can be done in the form of a package on the jffs2 filesystem; OpenWRT’s goal is to provide a minimal base which can be expanded through the use of software packages.”
The interface to the box looks like a Web page. The boxes can be programmed to attach to some central service for configuration. I think the idea is to create large networks of these devices, but I’m not sure.
The goal, create scalable Wi-Fi networks for smaller businesses, built from small, cheap boxes rather than lots of expensive gear from Cisco. The server software supports community building in an extended network of nodes.
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March 16, 2005
Please Mr. Carrier, May I Add Some Value?
Clay Shirky talks an imaginary phone (click to enlarge)
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Clay Shirky, who studies the “recently possible” is speaking on the topic of phone as platform. He’s presenting student work from his homebase, ITP.
First up is “PacManhattan” a PacMan-like “big game”. That is, a game that uses humans moving around an real space. GPS didn’t work well because 10-meter accuracy doesn’t cut it for urban environments. So, they punted and used a control room that relayed instructions through the phone to players in the field.
The second game was ConQwest. The game used two-dimensional bar codes to post information around an area and players took camera phone pictures of the bar code and sent it to another computer for decoding and instructions.
Another example is Dodgeball.com, a social networking site that uses mobile phones. The mobile phone is the first thing since keys were invented that everyone carries around with them. He describes how he used Dodgeball.com to get to an event, it SMS’d messages to his friends where he was and also sent him an SMS telling him someone he was linked through someone else was also at the event. Dodgeball is a social mesh built on a P2P network.
Mobjects are bluetooth enabled objects that are viable and sensory. When you hug your mobject, for example, it uses your phone to send a message to someone else’s phone and that causes their mobject to light up.
Some thoughts:
- Standard connectivity beats local flexibility
- Only the minimum platform is widespread
- Camera is the first tool other than SMS to be normal
- Device manufacturer’s are unfamiliar with hackishness.
- 0wnz3r3d by the carriers.
- Server infrastructure is key.
- Out-of-band is complementary
- Voice is underused: phone trees, voice as .WAV
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February 16, 2005
Bluetooth Rearview Mirror
LG has a Bluetooth rearview mirror that shows caller id information from your phone. Very cool.
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December 15, 2004
Hollywood Wants BitTorrent Dead
A Wired article today has the bold headline Hollywood Wants BitTorrent Dead.
In the United States and the United Kingdom, the Motion Picture Association of America, the main lobbying arm of U.S. film studios, filed civil lawsuits against more than 100 operators of BitTorrent “tracker” servers that point to locations where digital files of movies, music and other content can be found.From Wired News: Hollywood Wants BitTorrent Dead
Referenced Wed Dec 15 2004 19:27:05 GMT-0700
BitTorrent is a protocol that can be used to transfer large files. Clients are simultaneously servers so that the originator of a popular file doesn’t have to pay the full cost of its distribution. More importantly, the protocol’s performance improves as its popularity increases since there are more servers to take up the load. This makes it an important technology for distributing everything from podcasts to Linux ISO images. This analogy might help explain:
One analogy to describe this process might be to visualize a group of people sitting at a table. Each person at the table can both talk and listen to any other person at the table. These people are each trying to get a complete copy of a book. Person A announces that he has pages 1-10, 23, 42-50, and 75. Persons C, D, and E are each missing some of those pages that A has, and so they coordinate such that A gives them each copies of the pages he has that they are missing. Person B then announces that she has pages 11-22, 31-37, and 63-70. Persons A, D, and E tell B they would like some of her pages, so she gives them copies of the pages that she has. The process continues around the table until everyone has announced what they have (and hence what they are missing.) The people at the table coordinate to swap parts of this book until everyone has everything. There is also another person at the table, who we’ll call ‘S’. This person has a complete copy of the book, and so doesn’t need anything sent to him. He responds with pages that no one else in the group has. At first, when everyone has just arrived, they all must talk to him to get their first set of pages. However, the people are smart enough to not all get the same pages from him. After a short while they all have most of the book amongst themselves, even if no one person has the whole thing. In this manner, this one person can share a book that he has with many other people, without having to give a full copy to everyone that’s interested. He can instead give out different parts to different people, and they will be able to share it amongst themselves. This person who we’ve referred to as ‘S’ is called a seed in the terminology of BitTorrent.From Brian’s BitTorrent FAQ and Guide: What is BitTorrent?
Referenced Wed Dec 15 2004 19:30:47 GMT-0700
If you read the Wired article, you’ll see that what the MPAA went after was something called tracker sites.
BitTorrent, eDonkey and Direct Connect allow millions of internet users to share copies of movies, music, software and games. The services don’t host the files themselves; instead, they point users to other users who have the files available for sharing. In BitTorrent’s case, users tap tracker sites that keep dynamic lists of where files are stored and available for download. The MPAA is trying to cripple BitTorrent and its peers by suing people who host the tracker servers. Because of its efficiency in helping users handle very large files — such as digital copies of feature-length films — BitTorrent has attracted the enmity of Hollywood.From Wired News: Hollywood Wants BitTorrent Dead
Referenced Wed Dec 15 2004 19:38:08 GMT-0700
This makes it sound like tracker sites are analogous to the search server in the old Napster, but that’s not really the case. The tracker is similar in that its the only centralized piece in all of this. It serves a different function, however. The tracker is a server that coordinates the trading of the various bits of the file. Trackers do not have any knowledge of the content of the files and aren’t used to find the original file. Their limited duties make them fast and able to support large numbers of users with limited bandwidth. Note that unlike Napster, there’s not just one tracker. Every file being distributed could, potentially, have its own tracker.
If you read the article without a clear understanding of what a tracker does, its easy to think that the MPAA just went after “the bad guys” and that trackers being used to legally coordinate the distribution of other material could remain untouched. But how can you tell which is which? It would seem to me that someone running a public tracker is in the same position as an ISP or common carrier. They don’t know the content and therefore can’t be held responsible for it.
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November 11, 2004
Scale-Free Networks
Today Scoble writes about a conversation he had with Steven Levy about being on the A-List. Robert says he consciously combs through less read bloggers to find things not seen before. This of course, brings to mind Clay Shirky’s piece on power laws. That, reminded me that I wanted to post something about Peter Denning’s latest column in Communications of the ACM on Network Laws (PDF).
Denning, as usual, gives a wonderfully cogent tutorial on power laws and talks about scale-free networks. Scale-free networks are networks that have power-law connection statistics. Scale-free networks have two properties:
- Growth: new nodes appear at random times
- Preferential attachment: a new node connects to an existing node with probability proportional to the number of connections already at that node.
Note that I’m paraphrasing rather than quoting because the PDF won’t let me grabs snippets conviniently.
The bottom line is that the power-law distribution is self-reinforcing in scale-free networks. Denning mentions that viruses spread quickly in scale-free networks. The same is true of ideas. Other important thoughts: failure of a random node in a scale-free network has negligible effect on connectivity, but failure of a hub does significant damage.
Large social networks are scale-free. To spread an innovative idea, bring the hubs (think Scoble, Doc, or Winer here) on board. To stop an innovative idea, convince the hubs its of no value. The business of spreading innovations is a skill that improves over time.
Denning also talks about the idea that many of the biggest innovations of our time like the Internet, Web, and Linux were built by consortia. Viewed from the perspective of the network a consortium is a consciously built hub in the scale-free social network.
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November 09, 2004
VoIP Gets a Helping Hand from the FCC
The FCC ruled against state regulation of the fledgling VoIP (voice over IP) market today. The specific ruling was against the State of Minnesota regulating Vonage, but the result will likely forestall regulation by other states as well. This will force states to come to grips with the imbalances in their tax policies with respect to telecommunications since I’m sure it won’t be long before the RBOCs are crying “foul.” I’ll be interested to see what the Utah Legislature does this next session in this area.
In the meantime, enjoy the savings. I’ve been a Vonage customer for almost two years now and have had a great experience. In fact, I just dropped my second Qwest line in my house in favor of Vonage. I don’t really have a good reason for not dropping Qwest altogether. Not only is the base service cheaper, but you also pay fewer taxes, a benefit that will persist thanks to today’s ruling. What could be better?
The importance of today’s ruling goes beyond lower prices, however. To my mind, the importance of the VoIP market is the innovation that’s occuring in the product space. Vonage gives me a full dashboard on my account with the ability to switch phone numbers, add inexpensive virtual phone numbers almost anywhere in the country that ring on my main line, and so on. For the first time, we have the opportunity for real competition in telecommunications and the innovation that such competition spurs. That’s why today’s FCC ruling is a big win for consumers, even if they don’t realize it yet.
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October 20, 2004
Extending Bluetooth's Range
My first introduction to computers was in the pages of Popular Electronics magazine. In 1975 there was an article about the MITS Altair computer with a whopping 256 bytes of memory (and no, I didn’t forget the K or M) that I must have read 1000 times trying to decipher the details. A year later, I had the opportunity to build a MITS Altair computer for the College of Mines at the University of Idaho. I loved that computer—front panel switches and all. I don’t think Popular Electronics is still published, but its sister publication, Popular Science is still kicking and even online. Its good to see that they’re still in the business of publishing fun little hacks, like this article on extending the range of Bluetooth by adding an antenna.
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October 04, 2004
Walled Gardens vs. Networked Effects
“Walled garden” is the term that industry uses for online communities that capture users inside a Web that is anything but world-wide. The services inside the walled garden are the ones the service provider chooses and they almost always involve increased revenue for the service provider. When I was at Excite\@Home, we had a project to build set-top boxes for our cable partners that included a cable modem, but kept users inside a walled garden of for pay services. These walled gardens were for cable subscribers who didn’t sign on for broadband services. The idea of walled gardens is far from dead. You live with them everyday on your phone. I hardly ever use the network services on my ATT phone because its all about shoving ringtones and wallpaper down my throat rather than letting me get to the information that I need.
In the Sept 16 issue of the Gillmor Gang, Ray Ozzie (of Notes and Groove fame) talks about how hard it is to create collaborative environments on portable devices for a similar reason. The operating systems on portable devices are too fractured and the interactions too limited to support network effects. The applications being built for mobile devices are mostly used for personal productivity rather than collaboration—and that’s just on the bigger platforms like Palm.
One of my biggest complaints about broadband providers today is that they put their users in walled gardens, of sorts. These are not the nearly closed off containers of the mobile phone companies, but rather gardens with one-way mirrors. You can GET anything you like, but you’d better not want to produce any content yourself. Comcast’s view of the world is that they produce services and you consume them. The world would be richer without these artificial boundaries and restrictions. Blogging is proof that people want a two way experience on the net.
In some ways, it makes me wonder how the Web even came to be. When you think about how the natural tendency of business is to create sugar-coated, weak imitations of real networked environments, you realize what an amazing place the Web is. Its not that companies haven’t tried to take over the Web and turn it into their own private venue, but it just hasn’t worked. A combination of user resistance and the shear size of the phenomenon kept it from happening.
The edge vs. center debate is related to this as well. Are edge devices just large caches for things that the center of the network maintains or the other way around? Ozzie notes that the iPod is a cache for what’s in iTunes, which is a cache, in a sense, for what’s out on the net. Then there’s services like Flickr that reverse that. My computer is the canonical source for my photos and Flickr is just a cache of what’s on my computer.
I think businesses have to be extremely careful to preserve the environments where network effect flourish. They’re too easy to kill. There may be too much altruism required in many cases. My primary reason for supporting UTOPIA and other community broadband plays is that the critics are simply wrong: private industry will not build the kind of networks that we need if left alone.
The same is patently true in mobile networks. The possibilities are so much greater than what we’re getting right now. I’m not advocating government intervention—-the FCC would likely do more harm than good—-but I know what we’ve got now simply isn’t all that we need. I hold some hope that mobile will fix itself as infrastructure costs come down as long as the FCC provides access to the airwaves. WiMax could, for example, help solve this problem as long as it can get bandwidth outside the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands. Otherwise, its just crowding in with phones, Wi-Fi, and microwave ovens.
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August 05, 2004
Onion Routing
Ever wanted, or needed, to surf the Web anonymously? Intelligence officers have this need, but so do others. Anonymizing proxies can make it so that the site you visit doesn’t know who you are, but they don’t protect you from instream eavesdroppers or your own company or ISP. Now there’s an open source project you can use to protect your communications called Tor.
The Naval Research Lab came up with a concept called “onion routing” to make it difficult for any one entity to be able to piece together traffic information about Web usage to determine who’s using the Web for what. Its not perfectly anonymous, with enough time and some court orders, you could figure it out, but its not easy. The concept is pretty simply. Each message packet in a network transaction is packaged with instructions about the next network hop and then encrypted. This process is repeated, at least three times. As each router gets the message, it unpeels one layer and then uses the enclosed routing instructions to send the message on. As a consequence, any one router has only local routing information.
Tor is the second generation onion router. The Tor client behaves like a SOCKS proxy, so as long as you’re client can talk SOCKS, you can use Tor. There are currently about 35 operations Tor nodes. You may want to consider setting one up, but you only need the client to make use of the network.