We would be using one of the other protocols that were common at the time, before TCP/UDP/IP took over everything.
What would happen if we didn't use TCP or UDP?
51–60 of 116 posts
Re: What would happen if we didn't use TCP or UDP?
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
SCTP is fascinating because it's one of the backbone technologies that makes communication possible for most people on the planet (as the mobile network stack pretty much relies on it), yet it's effectively unsupported on almost every consumer device. If you want to use it, you're probably going to have to ship a userland implementation that needs privileges to open a raw network socket, because kernel implementation…
It’s too bad the original IP could not have included some kind of stronger header integrity lock to block middle boxes. It would have forced us to adopt V6 and… my god… the network would be so much cleaner and superior in every way. Things would just have addresses, and protocol innovation at L3 would be possible.
I'd like to agree with you, but IPv6 had such a classic case of suffocation by committee during its birth that I doubt it would have been pushed by such a situation. IPSec was mandated in the original IPv6 RFC, for god's sake. That alone delayed a lot of work in implementing it as crypto code needed to be integrated into kernels, which was not common in those days. That's to say nothing about the fact that IPSec is loosely defined enough that setting it up between different vendors is always an adventure - adding support to an IP stack was a big headache (I followed OpenBSD at the time they were integrating IPv6 in the early 2000s and there was a lot of hard problems around compatibility).
Header integrity was so far off of consideration during IPv4's implementation because the internet was a dozen universities and DoD sites that it was overkill (and possibly a waste of limited CPU cycles at the time).
What's far more likely to have happened is that we'd see more proxies instead of NATs (SOCKS, etc). I don't think that'd be better than NAT.
Re: What would happen if we didn't use TCP or UDP?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s too bad the original IP could not have included some kind of stronger header integrity lock to block middle boxes. It would have forced us to adopt V6 and… my god… the network would be so much cleaner and superior in every way. Things would just have addresses, and protocol innovation at L3 would be possible.
I'd like to agree with you, but IPv6 had such a classic case of suffocation by committee during its birth that I doubt it would have been pushed by such a situation. IPSec was mandated in the original IPv6 RFC, for god's sake. That alone delayed a lot of work in implementing it as crypto code needed to be integrated into kernels, which was not common in those days. That's to say nothing about the fact that IPSec is l…
There's some history I'm not aware of here. I didn't know just how bad the V6 second system committee shitshow was.
Today V6 has been stripped down almost to what it should have been: bigger addresses, then stop. All that's left to get there is to deprecate SLAAC or make it optional.
Re: What would happen if we didn't use TCP or UDP?
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd like to agree with you, but IPv6 had such a classic case of suffocation by committee during its birth that I doubt it would have been pushed by such a situation. IPSec was mandated in the original IPv6 RFC, for god's sake. That alone delayed a lot of work in implementing it as crypto code needed to be integrated into kernels, which was not common in those days. That's to say nothing about the fact that IPSec is l…
There's some history I'm not aware of here. I didn't know just how bad the V6 second system committee shitshow was. Today V6 has been stripped down almost to what it should have been: bigger addresses, then stop. All that's left to get there is to deprecate SLAAC or make it optional.
SLAAC’s awesome, though. It’s one of the good parts we definitely want to keep.
Re: What would happen if we didn't use TCP or UDP?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's some history I'm not aware of here. I didn't know just how bad the V6 second system committee shitshow was. Today V6 has been stripped down almost to what it should have been: bigger addresses, then stop. All that's left to get there is to deprecate SLAAC or make it optional.
SLAAC’s awesome, though. It’s one of the good parts we definitely want to keep.
Let's say your ISP gives you a /64. Now you have to use V6 NAT... or assign a /96 internally. SLAAC won't let you do that.
That, among other things, is a problem. SLAAC is too limited.
You can use DHCPv6 but then you can't use Android because Android, and I think they're alone here, stubbornly and dogmatically refuses to implement it. I guess you could go around and statically assign V6 IPs to Android devices, or run NATv6 with SLAAC for those and DHCPv6 for everything else, but that's annoying as hell.
Re: What would happen if we didn't use TCP or UDP?
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's some history I'm not aware of here. I didn't know just how bad the V6 second system committee shitshow was. Today V6 has been stripped down almost to what it should have been: bigger addresses, then stop. All that's left to get there is to deprecate SLAAC or make it optional.
SLAAC’s awesome, though. It’s one of the good parts we definitely want to keep.
SLAAC is awesome, but DNS support in it didn't show up until much later. The result is a mish-mash of DHCPv6/SLAAC support (and android famously doesn't support DHCPv6 at all and windows only supported DHCPv6 until windows 10).
Re: What would happen if we didn't use TCP or UDP?
#57We would be sending data via rockets guided by pigeons inside of them.
Re: What would happen if we didn't use TCP or UDP?
#58It feels like the article ends with a cliffhanger!
Why did a single packet of the custom protocol get through with all later packets dropped? Does anyone know?
Re: What would happen if we didn't use TCP or UDP?
#59Infiniband works great...
Re: What would happen if we didn't use TCP or UDP?
#60There's also Bell Labs IL - Internet Link - used to speed up 9P links for Plan 9 over LANs. https://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/il/ And this brings me to why I love networking on Plan 9. First off the dial string, net!address!service, passes the network along with the address and service port letting you easily switch protocols as needed. e.g. a program could listen on IL port 666 using the dial string il…
Reminds me a bit of UUCP or AT&T Datakit addressing.