We'll switch to IPv6, and every service will still go through port 80.
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The world in which IPv6 was a good design
41–50 of 199 posts
Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design
#42>One person at work put it best: "layers are only ever added, never removed." Find this in the software world as well. Something about the java culture seems especially fascinated with multiple layers of abstraction. Edit: Ok, some factions of the culture. " Convenient proxy factory bean superclass for proxy factory beans that create only singletons"
Some infamous examples of such java classes (For some reason Spring always seemed to have more verbose names than other DI frameworks, which is saying something):
SimpleBeanFactoryAwareAspectInstanceFactory
SerializedEntityManagerFactoryBeanReference
http://git.eclipse.org/c/aspectj/org.aspectj.git/tree/org.as...
Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Check out ZeroTier It implements a virtual ethernet layer using cryptographic identities underneath. Here's the relevant section on the address computation from the manual: https://www.zerotier.com/manual.shtml#2_1_2
This seems really complicated. Is ZeroTier closer to an cjdns- / i2p-style system, or is it closer to CurveCP/MinimaLT/QUIC? (QUIC being the odd one out of the trio as it grafts on some awful HTTP semantics, but that's Google for you.)
Yeah, I did link to a particularly dense and unapproachable section of the manual.
ZT is designed to just be an end to end encrypted virtual LAN for anything you want to dump across it.
There's also a library implementation which effectively gives every app its own cryptographically-derived address (if that's what you're into).
Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Check out ZeroTier It implements a virtual ethernet layer using cryptographic identities underneath. Here's the relevant section on the address computation from the manual: https://www.zerotier.com/manual.shtml#2_1_2
This seems really complicated. Is ZeroTier closer to an cjdns- / i2p-style system, or is it closer to CurveCP/MinimaLT/QUIC? (QUIC being the odd one out of the trio as it grafts on some awful HTTP semantics, but that's Google for you.)
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Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design
#45What he's really arguing for is a circuit-switched network, so that connections can be persistent over moves. He just needs a unique connection ID. One amusing possibility would be to do this at the HTTPS layer. With HTTPS Everywhere, most HTTP connections now have a unique connection ID at the crypto layer - the session key. If you could move an HTTP connection from one IP address to another on the fly, it could be…
> One amusing possibility would be to do this at the HTTPS layer. With HTTPS Everywhere, most HTTP connections now have a unique connection ID at the crypto layer - the session key. As a network-ignoramus, who likes cryptography, I’ve long dreamt of a networking protocol where endpoints are defined, primarily, by a public key. All messages would be encrypted with the destination public key, and signed by the source p…
Interesting idea. One thought would be add encryption and signing to the routing. Meaning unless you have the right permissions, your packets won't even get to the destination.
Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design
#46That is a beautifully-written article.
The IEEE hardware and IETF software guys have been busy adding complexity to the networks, with so many legacy protocols (when everyone just uses TCP/IP) and extra ports (when everything happens on port 80 - seriously, even email is now on cloud services).
I can't get LTE because of political problems. So I just gave up trying to be online, and started caching everything possible.
Meanwhile, storage is getting larger capacity, smaller size, and cheaper. I've got a 512GB SD card in my pocket all the time, with a backup of my laptop in case my bag gets stolen.
My phone does everything offline if possible. Offline MP3 music. Offline maps. Wikipedia. StackOverflow. Hacker News. FML. UrbanDictionary. XKCD. The few YouTube videos I actually want to see again.
The only thing I need Internet for is communication. To send a message, I walk around looking for open WiFi and type my message to them on Facebook Messenger. If they need to reach me urgently, they can just use my phone number (which keeps changing every 6 months for the same political problems).
What if access points had large caches with mirrors of the content people want? Instead of asking Google's server in the US to send me a map tile, what if I could just get it from the local WiFi AP's web server? It would be much faster, and save so much trouble with networking.
Sure, there are some things that people need the network for (e.g. new content, copyrighted material). But so much else is free of licenses, and would be possible to mirror locally everywhere.
Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design
#47This was a great read.
Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One amusing possibility would be to do this at the HTTPS layer. With HTTPS Everywhere, most HTTP connections now have a unique connection ID at the crypto layer - the session key. As a network-ignoramus, who likes cryptography, I’ve long dreamt of a networking protocol where endpoints are defined, primarily, by a public key. All messages would be encrypted with the destination public key, and signed by the source p…
Interesting idea. One thought would be add encryption and signing to the routing. Meaning unless you have the right permissions, your packets won't even get to the destination.
I'd much rather routing be about getting data from one known point to another.
A /session/ should be able to be serviced by multiple routes, maybe with a preference (use the cheaper ones first, the faster ones first, etc) or maybe over time (in the case of mobile).
Having connectivity based at the session level and having a single server be 'multi-homed' (many addresses, each conforming to a different outbound link) would peel complexity back from the lower layers and allow them to focus on being simple, robust, and easy to diagnose.
It would also move control and management back up to higher layers, and as recently shown with a description of Google's core network devices, back to the end points where a larger and more complete view can be used to determine the best overall solution.
Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One amusing possibility would be to do this at the HTTPS layer. With HTTPS Everywhere, most HTTP connections now have a unique connection ID at the crypto layer - the session key. As a network-ignoramus, who likes cryptography, I’ve long dreamt of a networking protocol where endpoints are defined, primarily, by a public key. All messages would be encrypted with the destination public key, and signed by the source p…
Interesting idea. One thought would be add encryption and signing to the routing. Meaning unless you have the right permissions, your packets won't even get to the destination.
I’m not sure I follow why this would be desirable. As a sender of a packet, why would I care who routes my (encrypted) packet to its destination? Why would I want to restrict the number of possible routes from me to the receiver?
Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design
#50>In truth, that really is just complicating things. Now your operating system has to first look up the ethernet address of 192.168.1.1, find out it's 11:22:33:44:55:66, and finally generate a packet with destination ethernet address 11:22:33:44:55:66 and destination IP address 10.1.1.1. 192.168.1.1 is just a pointless intermediate step.
This is completely wrong, it's not pointless.
First, this can be used to easily swap out routers in a network without reconfiguring any clients or even incurring downtime. Without the intermediary gateway IP representation, this would mean you would either have to spoof the MAC on the second router or reconfigure all of the clients to point to the new gateway.
Second, ethernet addresses are a layer-2 construct and IP routes are a layer 3 construct. Your default gateway is a layer-3 route to 0.0.0.0/0. There are protocols for exchanging layer-3 routes like BGP/RIP/etc that should not have to know anything about the layer-2 addressing scheme to provide the next-hop address.
Third, routers still need to have an IP address on the subnet anyway to originate ICMP messages (e.g. TTL expired, MTU exceeded, etc).
Fourth, ARP is still necessary even for the router itself to know how to take incoming IP traffic from the outside and actually forward it to the appropriate device on the local network. Otherwise you would have to statically configure a mapping of local IP addresses to MAC addresses on the router.
So ARP is critical for separation of concerns between L2 and L3. We don't live in an ethernet-only world.
>excessive ARP starts becoming one of your biggest nightmares. It's especially bad on wifi.
Broadcast can become a nightmare. Excessive ARP is a drop in the bucket compared to other discovery crap that computers spew onto networks.
The pattern of most computers now is to communicate with the external world (from the LAN perspective) and not much else. So on a network of 1000 computers (an already excessively large broadcast domain), your ARP traffic is going to be a couple of thousand ARP messages every few hours. If this is taking down your WiFi network, you have much bigger problems considering all of those are about a modern webpage load of traffic.