utilise port numbers.
and cue the port number fascists
The world in which IPv6 was a good design
61–70 of 199 posts
Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design
#62>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 s…
> This is completely wrong, it's not pointless.
Pretty reliable rule of software is: if you think it's pointless you probably don't understand it well enough.
Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design
#63>And nowadays big data centers are basically just SDNed, and you might as well not be using IP in the data center at all, because nobody's routing the packets. It's all just one big virtual bus network. The opposite trend is true in large data centers. L3 fabrics where everything is routed have become extremely popular because BGP (or custom SDN setups) can be used to migrate IPs and you get to utilize multiple paths…
But then you're tunneling your L2 across your L3. So if you provide connectivity to a customer in a datacenter all they'll see is the L2. But you're right. Underneath everything is an IP fabric these days.
Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design
#64What if the server needs to send you a packet while you're mobile but you haven't sent it a packet yet so it can update its cache? That packet will be lost in his scheme. Nice try.
IP is best effort. Packets get lost all the time. Higher protocols, like TCP and QUIC, all handle packet loss--typically by trying again. Losing a packet is better than losing all open connections.
Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should read about QUIC, which is designed to be able to do this, almost exactly like you describe. https://www.chromium.org/quic
I’d really like to remove the idea of a “connection” from the protocol, and leave that to the routing protocol. In other words, the proposed protocol would be purely logical, and would only define what constitutes a sender (one who can sign a packet with its source public key) and a receiver (one who can sign a packet with its destination public key). Again, I’m fairly network-ignorant, but as far as I can see this c…
The problem is routing. Given a signature, how do you look up the next hop, without needing a full table mapping everything.
IP addresses form a hierarchy, which makes it doable.
Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design
#66>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 s…
> This is completely wrong, it's not pointless. Pretty reliable rule of software is: if you think it's pointless you probably don't understand it well enough.
Reliable rule, and not just for software. Seems like a good place for mentioning 'Chesterton's Fence'....
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.
Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design
#67>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"
Computers don't understand concepts and people only do. Our gradual ascent from hardware to intuitively-usable mechanisms involves abstracting away the repeated "okay, given these primitives, here's how we'd use them" to go the next layer up.
But that's non necessarily a good way. It's the easy way out of "I don't like these details, so I'll try to hide them under something". A good abstraction is worth its weight in gold. A bad abstraction (the vast majority) is worth its weight in dung.
Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design
#68One big UX mistake of IPv6: it was not made backward compatible with IPv4. (v6)0.0.192.168.1.10 == 192.168.1.10(v4).
This simple design when planning and rolling it out would have meant incrementally updating the networking stack to also support v6. Now it turns out v4 and v6 are completely different, and no one has a big enough reason to make the change until everyone else makes the change. Hard chicken-egg problem.
Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just treat the port as an extension of the binary address space of the IP address. No need to "drop" ports otherwise.
But that breaks the layering (where reachability is provided by l3 and transport by l4). Now existing internetwork routers cannot handle your new 144-bit address format. The folks at IETF meetings are doing a wonderful job trying to keep existing tech working. That's why you always extend old standards and rarely deprecate anything. Just look at BGP, for example. We, the application software programmers on layers 5 t…
I didn't mean to actually concatenate the two, only to treat them as if they were on the application level.
Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design
#70I am very glad IPv6 didn't catch on. The world in which it was designed was not a world in which everyone (NSA, Google, Facebook) was trying to document and correlate every tiny thing you do, whether it is related to them or not.
If IPv6 eventually becomes widespread, I hope it comes with ISPs that will let you replace your prefix, and phones/hardware that will randomize your suffix - otherwise, the internet becomes completely pseudonymous.