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Protocol Wars

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51–60 of 121 posts

Re: Protocol Wars

#51

Post by pif »

eternityforest wrote: post #38

I wish we could start over and redesign everything from Ethernet up to TLS with the lessons we now understand. So many layers could be merged, security could be so much easier, IP addressing hassles could be unnecessary. But all the stuff that seems obvious now couldn't have been learned without the decades of kind of terrible hackery that is OSI and the associated awful stuff like DNS. I'm not sure what the moral of…

> I wish we could start over and redesign everything ...

I wish we all could learn that "because it works now" is a valid reason to resist change, and that assuring back compatibility is a condicio sine qua non for every change that we want adopted by people at large.

Re: Protocol Wars

#52

Post by pif »

aardvark179 wrote: post #48
talideon wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. The main impetus to achieve FTL communication will be because it'll be easier than shifting people off of TCP.

It’s all fun and games until you get an ACK before you sent the SYN.

That's a solved problem, just ask the thiotimoline research group.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiotimoline

Re: Protocol Wars

#53

Post by distcs »

867-5309 wrote: post #43
londons_explore wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, even with QUIC and a brand new Google phone on a Google wifi network and a Google Fi cell connection, I still can't walk away from my house and have a video call migrate from wifi to 5G without the audio glitching and dropping frames. All the mobility benefits of QUIC mean nothing when the rest of the software stack isn't designed to let it work.

that's never going to be a seamless transition. the fact the transition happens automatically is a marvel in itself

> that's never going to be a seamless transition.

Why not? It is not obvious to me why a seamless transition is impossible?

Isn't the whole point of TCP that individual packets can take different paths over different networks and when they reach the destination they can be sequenced? Why should changing the network disrupt the individual packets from traveling independently?

Re: Protocol Wars

#54

Post by pif »

greyface- wrote: post #16
samwillis wrote: post #3

TCP/IP is so entrenched in everything, literally, it will still be in use when we leave this planet and it gets swallowed up by the sun. The news will report the destruction of Earth and explain that it and its inhabitants longest lasting legacy is TCP/IP, then report that the transition to IPv6 is going well and everyone will be on it soon...

TCP becomes unusable under interplanetary latencies; leaving the planet will force us to transition off of it.

More likely, we will end up with 15 competing standard.

https://xkcd.com/927/

Re: Protocol Wars

#55

Post by cesarb »

talideon wrote: post #22
zekica wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main issue with IPv6 adoption is people who didn't learn IPv4 before NAT, and want to use the hammer (IPv4 NAT) for everything.

Also, developers who don't know how to get their daemons to listen on multiple interfaces at once.

That's not necessary; listening on the wildcard IPv6 address without the "IPv6 only" flag enabled on the socket is enough. A IPv4 connection arriving at it is mapped to a special IPv6 address, so the code doesn't have to care about IPv4.

Unless you were using Windows, where IIRC the IPv4 and IPv6 stacks were separate, and a single socket couldn't be used to listen to both at the same time. (This might already have been fixed in more recent Windows releases.)

Re: Protocol Wars

#56

Post by spmurrayzzz »

Joker_vD wrote: post #28
PinguTS wrote: post #5

… and today we are going to try to fit Ethernet, TCP/IP, and so on onto the OSI reference model.

No, we don't. The OSI reference model keeps getting referenced (hah) in the network courses but it's merely a lip service, nobody's actually taking it seriously: just look at how mobile networks bend over in ridiculous ways to support TCP/IP.

I don't know if I'd say its universally lip service. Perhaps that's true in some areas of tech, but in my corner of the world building an ISP, practically all of network hardware OEMs I'm exposed to (mostly cisco, but also some juniper, arista, and zyxel) use the OSI model predominantly in their product descriptions and documentation.

Re: Protocol Wars

#57

Post by pif »

vmfunction wrote: post #8
samwillis wrote: post #3

TCP/IP is so entrenched in everything, literally, it will still be in use when we leave this planet and it gets swallowed up by the sun. The news will report the destruction of Earth and explain that it and its inhabitants longest lasting legacy is TCP/IP, then report that the transition to IPv6 is going well and everyone will be on it soon...

The fact that it takes so long to transition to IPv6 and like many other obstruction to technological/social progress are economic and business gain for a certain small group of people and organisations.

IPv6 lacks back compatibility with the current standard. It cannot succeed.

Re: Protocol Wars

#58

Post by AnimalMuppet »

moomin wrote: post #2

This was still raging when I was a student. From my recollection I _heard_ a lot more about OSI, but everything I used had something proprietary (e.g. NetWare, Token Ring) or TCP/IP. The people supporting TCP/IP had a head start and out-executed the OSI committees and it wasn’t even funny.

Yeah. Top-down vs. agile. Cathedral vs. bazaar. "The right thing" vs "worse is better". And, as you said, the agile/bazaar/worse-is-better camp totally out-executed the top-down/cathedral/do-it-right approach, to the point that OSI is only a theoretical model at this point, and TCP/IP is running in everything from supercomputers to washing machines.

Another one of the "well-done in theory, but left in the dust by reality" approaches: X.25.

Re: Protocol Wars

#59

Post by bauruine »

pif wrote: post #57
vmfunction wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that it takes so long to transition to IPv6 and like many other obstruction to technological/social progress are economic and business gain for a certain small group of people and organisations.

IPv6 lacks back compatibility with the current standard. It cannot succeed.

It doesn't there are millions of IPv6 only devices that can connect to IPv4 only sites. See US mobile carriers.

Re: Protocol Wars

#60

Post by gwbas1c »

I remember learning about OSI in college in ... 2000.

I didn't understand why it wasn't a mere footnote. The professor came across as a sore loser, because it was unambiguously clear that OSI was firmly dead.

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