91–100 of 109 posts
I always wondered why it took so long to go from 10 Mbit/s to 100Mbit/s. For sure in that time they invented things like Ethernet Switching. But still, it seems like that standard took forever to move on. And then once it did it went from 100Mbit/s to 1000Mbit/s per second pretty damn fast.
The really crazy thing is that the consumer space is still stuck on 1gbps nearly twenty years after 10G base-t.
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The really crazy thing is that the consumer space is still stuck on 1gbps nearly twenty years after 10G base-t.
Is it really that crazy? 1 gig is overkill for the vast majority of people as it is.
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There's a surprising number of people who think you could magically expand the IPv4 address space in a backwards compatible manner.
There are semi-compatible ways. My favourite proposal (if we couldn't have IPv6) was recursive IP: you transmit a packet to 12.34.56.78 and inside that packet is a packet addressed to 192.168.1.5. If you have more layers of NAT, inside that can be a packet addressed to 10.1.2.3. If both endpoints do this you can directly establish connections. If only one does it, fall back to NAT like before. Core internet routers d…
The rapid change from coax ethernet to twisted pair was really something to witness. The original SynOptics LattisNet and StarLAN switches sparked a rapid standardisation effort (incompatible with either). We mostly (tried) to sell 3Com switches and routers as most of our customer base at the time heavily invested in XNS based Lan Manager networks. Within 18 months everything had changed, Cisco suddenly became the hottest networking vendor as all those early networking protocols (XNS, IPX, NETBEUI, DECNet etc) disappeared from local lans and entire companies got obliterated seemingly overnight.
I mean, who even remembers Ungermann-Bass? And DEC as referred to in the article started out a major player in the networking space and became an also-ran in no time. All the while the world had gone crazy ripping out coax and madly installing twisted pair.
There was a period there where my job involved juggling network drivers in DOS, so that you'd have j-u-s-t enough memory to start Windows. Any customer that needed two network protocols (not uncommon) tore their hair out with memory extenders and carefully crafted config.sys and autoexec.bat files and hoped the BIOS didn't get too radically changed when the next batch of PCs showed up. Horrible, funny in hindsight though.
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Similar to how it has been done with phone numbers. I saw this done in Brazil for example. You add a digit to the front and put all existing address on 0.*. Short number dials are assumed to be 0.*. Update OS and hardware. Then you allocate across the new digit much later as time goes on. The thing with phone infrastructure though is that it is centralized. So may happen in a reasonably coordinated rollout. Global in…
> You add a digit to the front and put all existing address on 0.* How do you do that? I have read the IPv4 protocol spec, there isn't any space to put that byte can still be IPv4. That is what I mean when nobody has proposed anything that I can implement: I have read the spec and it doesn't allow room for what you want to do. Sure conceptually you can describe any number of ideas - but they are not IPv4 and no exist…
The argument upthread was that v6 was too big a change, resulting in a slower than anticipated rollout. And perhaps merely shoehorning another byte or two into v4, say v4.1 would be easier and more quickly accepted by the world.
Possibly—I'm not strongly arguing for either, besides the fact that v6 didn't solve any problems I was having besides the world running out of addresses. It's a lot harder to grok at a glance though.
Also, a smaller change wouldn't break existing networks, just like the existence of v6 didn't break v4.
(This is basically the Python 2 to 3 transition argument in global form.)
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> You add a digit to the front and put all existing address on 0.* How do you do that? I have read the IPv4 protocol spec, there isn't any space to put that byte can still be IPv4. That is what I mean when nobody has proposed anything that I can implement: I have read the spec and it doesn't allow room for what you want to do. Sure conceptually you can describe any number of ideas - but they are not IPv4 and no exist…
Well, you asked for a design and I gave one. Any change is ultimately going to require a software rollout. (I suppose you could squeeze a byte into an underused header in the short term.) The argument upthread was that v6 was too big a change, resulting in a slower than anticipated rollout. And perhaps merely shoehorning another byte or two into v4, say v4.1 would be easier and more quickly accepted by the world. Pos…
What a great story. The spanning tree algo is under appreciated: this allowed people who didn’t understand networking to plug networks together the way you would plug extension power cables together,* making networking simple ( or alternatively insanely broken, when people had 400 computers on a single LAN with a rat’s nest of bridges and hubs…but unlike the extension cord case, nothing would catch literal fire). * d…
> people who didn’t understand networking A couple of decades ago I witnessed a classic demonstration of Weinberg's Corollary¹ when a spanning tree misconfiguration on a freshly-installed BlackDiamond disabled LINX for hours, throwing half of Britain's ISP peering into chaos. The switch in question was evidently cursed: it'd been dropped on my foot earlier that week, thus disabling me for hours, and everyone else inv…
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Well, you asked for a design and I gave one. Any change is ultimately going to require a software rollout. (I suppose you could squeeze a byte into an underused header in the short term.) The argument upthread was that v6 was too big a change, resulting in a slower than anticipated rollout. And perhaps merely shoehorning another byte or two into v4, say v4.1 would be easier and more quickly accepted by the world. Pos…
so we did what you proposed. Ipv6 is simpler than ipv4. You can handwave details different but they all suffe, from the same problem of rollout.
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Occasionally people don't understand how to plug extension power cables together, either, especially during times of high stress and low sleep. Once upon a time, when I was in IT support, I got a call from someone in a satellite office across town saying that their computer wouldn't turn on. A new production had begun and everyone was a bit frantic, so this was an urgent request. After asking them to hold the power s…
My Audio Video buddy has a very similar story. A school called because their newish PA system wasn’t working. Turns out the usual lady was out. The usual lady would rip the cord out of the wall every evening instead of pressing the power button. The stand in announcer was just trying to press the on off button like most normal people. They ended up having to replace expensive equipment because the person wouldn’t sto…
> Mark’s idea didn’t replace Ethernet—and that was its brilliance. By allowing store-and-forward switching between existing CSMA/CD coax-based Ethernets, bridges allowed easy upgrades of existing LANs. This reminds me of John Carmack's philosophy of great things coming from thinking locally and taking small steps. > Carmack subscribes to the philosophy that small, incremental steps are the fastest route to meaningful…