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Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years
91–100 of 407 posts
Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years
#92This is a comment for folks in homes with coax run for cable TV. Ethernet is great. I wired ethernet to most rooms in our remodel and set up wired access points or jacks in the office to connect directly to my computer. The speeds and consistency over wifi and mesh were remarkable. Especially consistency. We moved, and it's not feasible to run ethernet everywhere in our current home. However, whoever built the home r…
Can confirm.
Coax cabling in North American homes is really common. It was intended for running cable TV from your cable boxes to other rooms. Ethernet is rare. My current place also has coax everywhere. Like you, I use this for wired networking.
So the only thing I'll add is if you do run cable TV over coax in your house you'll need to use MoCa splitters if you want to run wired networking too. Splitters are cheap. You can buy them on Amazon. If you don't run cable TV you don't need splitters.
I would also advise you pay about $40 for a test kit to test your cable. I also needed this to find out where cables terminated to a central repeater.
I don't know what speeed I could get but I have nothing about gigabit ethernet and it runs to that speed (~930Mbps) just fine.
Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jumbo frames are not a thing on the internet. The internet has fossilized at 1500 byte MTU.
Jumbo frames could be a thing on the internet if there was a meaningful value proposition. Jumbo frames get plenty of adoption in LAN environments.
> Jumbo frames could be a thing on the internet
It being a thing on "the internet" would require it being a thing on a sizable majority of the internet. You'd need to get large network operators, peering points, user-facing ISPs, and even users themselves on board to change their setups.
And Path MTU discovery is still sufficiently unreliable as to make it incredibly painful to have partial large-MTU networks.
And if you do any of this with standard home customers, a hellscape torrent of user complaints is going to rain down on your support contacts. Which costs money. More money than is lost by the higher cost of routing smaller packets.
So, no, jumbo frames could not be a thing on the internet. There's a reason it's called fossilization. There is no technical reason precluding changing this, it's just frozen into way too many places to be changed.
Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
>rapidly approaching, if not already past the point, for a lot of people where a single machine will never use all of that capacity Now where have I heard that before...
> Now where have I heard that before... Ok, sorry, in another 30 years time people might want more than 1G to do brain dumps to their robo-shrink. In 2023, there are very few uses for home users that will exceed what a 1G connection can provide. But please enlighten me about where you think you've "heard this before"?
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Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jumbo frames are a thing.
I've been terrified to enable jumbo frames because every guide I've read has always had "you have to make sure that every single machine you ever communicate with has to also have jumbo frames on or you will cause a black hole that sucks the whole earth into it!!" kind of disclaimers when I just want to lower the overhead in copying files from my NAS that has some pathetic Atom CPU in it.
If you're not blocking ICMP, then PMTUD will take care of any issues where other hosts don't support jumbo frames
Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Deterministicly?
Sure. The only reason image generators aren't deterministic is that you inject randomness. Set the same random seed, get the same image. Download Stable Diffusion XL and run it locally and try it. There are models that can be run in both directions. Take a source image and generate a token stream prompt for it. That's your compressed image. Now run it forward to decompress. CPU intensive but massive compression ratio…
Well, the value proposition of image formats are 1. transmission, which requires both sender and receiver to have the exact same model, which requires us to standardize on some model and ship it with everything until the end of time, and 2. archival, which would require storing the model alongside the file (which might more than counteract any data saved from improved compression) and would be highly fraught because, unlike existing decompression algorithms, it cannot be described in simple text (and therefore reimplemented at will), which risks making the file inaccessible and defeating the point of archival.
It's a cool idea, especially for high-bandwidth, low-value contexts like streaming video calls, but I don't think it's going to wholesale replace ordinary lossy formats for images or prerecorded video delivery (and this is without considering the coding/decoding performance implications).
Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
L3 switches are absolutely a thing, they allow communication between different VLANs on the same hardware without needing to go through a router.
A layer 3 switch is just a switch and a router in the same chassis. I have layer 3 switches doing eBGP.
Well, the "OSI" model where there's a little disassembly and assembly line in your box, where each layer gets taken off by one robot and the payload of that inside package gets handed off to another concern -- all lies.
The chips that do this (if they've got the features, anyhow) do L2, L3, L4, L5, etc all at the same time. So it's not an L2 switch and L3 router -- it's both at the same time, looking at the whole packet at once.
But -- there is no such thing as an ethernet "router" -- it's just a bridge with a forwarding table populated (usually) by listening for MAC addresses and updating forwarding tables. "flood and learn" There are even less ethernetty things out there that use the ethernet signaling but mechanically populate the forwarding tables of switches.
But a "thing that forwards between vlans" usually means "a thing that forwards packets from one L3 subnet to another."
You could probably make some insane custom switch that has routing rules for forwarding mac address packets from one vlan to another based on a bunch of zany rules, but such a cursed object would be hated universally by all who come after you.
Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years
#98It's only disappointing that the most common standard nowadays is 1GB/s. I feel like there is a big gap and standards like 2.5GB/s or 5GB/s were somehow ignored and 10GB/s is a big jump up (also price wise)
Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been terrified to enable jumbo frames because every guide I've read has always had "you have to make sure that every single machine you ever communicate with has to also have jumbo frames on or you will cause a black hole that sucks the whole earth into it!!" kind of disclaimers when I just want to lower the overhead in copying files from my NAS that has some pathetic Atom CPU in it.
If you're not blocking ICMP, then PMTUD will take care of any issues where other hosts don't support jumbo frames
I'll try it.
If that's the case it's a shame we didn't take the chance with IPv6 to push to higher default MTUs since IPv6 already relies to a much higher degree on PMTUD since it lacks fragmentation.
Re: Ethernet Is Still Going Strong After 50 Years
#100This is a comment for folks in homes with coax run for cable TV. Ethernet is great. I wired ethernet to most rooms in our remodel and set up wired access points or jacks in the office to connect directly to my computer. The speeds and consistency over wifi and mesh were remarkable. Especially consistency. We moved, and it's not feasible to run ethernet everywhere in our current home. However, whoever built the home r…
> We moved, and it's not feasible to run ethernet everywhere in our current home. However, whoever built the home ran coax to nearly every room in the house - it's a bit ridiculous How old is the house? If its more than 20ish years old running coax everywhere was a great choice. That would be before CAT5e cable so if they had went with ethernet cable instead of coax you'd be looking at 100 Mb/s. If it was built befor…
Ethernet is switched and under 20Mb/s is more than usable for everything unless you transfer movie files and wait, in which it would take like up a few minutes to watch a video. If you browse it's more than enough.