Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

RFC 1925: The Twelve Networking Truths (1996)

rfc-editor.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–39 of 39 posts

Re: RFC 1925: The Twelve Networking Truths (1996)

#31

Post by marcosdumay »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #28
runiq wrote: post #17

13. It's always DNS.

DNS is nice, it's the only internet protocol that "just works" and doesn't need tuning with obscure Linux-only system parameters. Maybe it's because I don't use bind.

> Maybe it's because I don't use bind.

Windows AD is the worst culprit here. Most times when something breaks that can not possibly be linked to DNS, the AD is bridging the failure in some way.

That said, yeah, I'd bet the large majority of bind installations are broken too. It's just that DNS really resists failure, and the GP isn't exactly about when it fails.

Re: RFC 1925: The Twelve Networking Truths (1996)

#32

Post by cryptonector »

jruohonen wrote: post #3

I am not sure whether they (IETF) have managed to retain their humor, but some great "truths", such as: " With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they are going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them as they fly overhead." "It is always something." "It is more complicated than you think." Then: "This RFC raises no security is…

Check the publication date -- specifically the month and day.

Re: RFC 1925: The Twelve Networking Truths (1996)

#33

Post by cryptonector »

blowski wrote: post #5
RedShift1 wrote: post #2

Every old idea will be proposed again with a different name and a different presentation, regardless of whether it works. I'm old enough to have lived through this multiple times now :-(

What is there to be sad about retrying ideas? Maybe the reason they failed the first time is no longer true.

There's a lot of wheel reinvention going on in our industry.

Take Protocol Buffers. It exists because "ASN.1 sucks", but it's got all the problems that DER had, so it's really just a bad reinvention of ASN.1. In just the context of serialization formats you'll find a mind boggling amount of wheel reinvention. From S-expressions to all the 1980s RPCs (Apollo Domain, ONC, DCE, ...) to COM to all the ASN.1 encoding rules, to XML and FastInfoSet, to JSON and all the binary JSONs out there, to Protocol Buffers and Flat Buffers and... It's nuts. It goes on an on. And there's one or several RPCs for every one of these.

Re: RFC 1925: The Twelve Networking Truths (1996)

#35

Post by jruohonen »

cryptonector wrote: post #32
jruohonen wrote: post #3

I am not sure whether they (IETF) have managed to retain their humor, but some great "truths", such as: " With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they are going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them as they fly overhead." "It is always something." "It is more complicated than you think." Then: "This RFC raises no security is…

Check the publication date -- specifically the month and day.

Ups! :-)

Re: RFC 1925: The Twelve Networking Truths (1996)

#36

Post by seanhunter »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #28
runiq wrote: post #17

13. It's always DNS.

DNS is nice, it's the only internet protocol that "just works" and doesn't need tuning with obscure Linux-only system parameters. Maybe it's because I don't use bind.

Wow. That's the first time in my 25+-years on the internet I've ever heard someone say that dns "just works".

Re: RFC 1925: The Twelve Networking Truths (1996)

#37

Post by dev_slash_null »

bryancoxwell wrote: post #6

> With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they are going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them as they fly overhead. Not sure I understand how this applies to networking?

"When pigs fly" is an idiom to describe something that is very unlikely or rare.

To paraphrase, you can force a square peg into a round hole if you push hard enough, but it will probably lead to instability in unpredictable places.

E.g. you could probably tunnel all your corporate traffic through DNS if you try hard enough, but it's probably a bad idea.

Re: RFC 1925: The Twelve Networking Truths (1996)

#38

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

seanhunter wrote: post #36
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DNS is nice, it's the only internet protocol that "just works" and doesn't need tuning with obscure Linux-only system parameters. Maybe it's because I don't use bind.

Wow. That's the first time in my 25+-years on the internet I've ever heard someone say that dns "just works".

Wait till you find out about the cascading failure modes of TCP. You're in for the ride of your life.

Re: RFC 1925: The Twelve Networking Truths (1996)

#39

Post by seanhunter »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #38
seanhunter wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. That's the first time in my 25+-years on the internet I've ever heard someone say that dns "just works".

Wait till you find out about the cascading failure modes of TCP. You're in for the ride of your life.

I have run TCP/IP networks of thousands of machines before all the automated tooling that's around these days to make this not cause you to loose your sanity. I've seen many of the possible cascading failure modes there are to see at this point[1]. I stand by my claim that DNS is one of the most unreliable parts of the jenga tower though.

[1] eg the first time I had root on a unix box I accidentally advertised it as a gateway over bgp and had all the "outbound" tcp traffic for the business park our office was in and a small ISP coming into my box and timing out. Yeah bgp and routing protocols are also common causes of failure, but DNS is worse.

Post reply on HN