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Protocol Wars

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Re: Protocol Wars

#61

Post by eternityforest »

pif wrote: post #51
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.

"Because it works now" is a perfectly good reason, I was more talking about a hypothetical "wave a wand and change all devices overnight" scenario.

I think an IPv8(Apparently we skip odd numbers) could be a real practical thing one day though, because a lot of things really do with quite work that well. The classic "it's always DNS" meme seems to be very real, tying TLS to domains instead of IPs impedes anything on LAN, IPv6 has too much inconsistency in how many bits are allocated to customers, and would be much saner with a more structured ISP/Region/Subnet/DeviceChosenIDThatIsTheSameEvenIfYouChangeISPs scheme so every ISP got the same number of bits.

Insecure DNS doesn't need to exist outside of MDNS, and even MDNS could at least have pairing prompts, if all records are signed and everything is secured at the IP level(Embedding key hashes in the IP), then certificate authorities don't need to exist either.

MACs don't really need to be a thing either outside industrial niche stuff, if we mostly just do IP traffic, that extra framing and the lookup/translation layer can go away.

Some level of onion routing could probably just be built right into IP itself, there's not much reason an ISP or even the local wifi router needs to know the destination I'm sending a packet to, if there's a fixed heirarchal structure, it just needs to know the recipients ISP, and the rest could potentially be encrypted at the cost of some negotiation setup complexity.

Re: Protocol Wars

#63

Post by [deleted] »

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

[deleted]

Re: Protocol Wars

#64

Post by tenebrisalietum »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #62

In the mid-1980s, I took the OSI course. That's a bunch of time I'll never get back. That was nothing, though, compared to the X.400 course...

OSI concepts are still important, even if none of the layers map to a specific set of protocols and things are blurry near layer 1 and 2.

For example, the fact that presentation and application are separate layers, and that compression/encryption are better in their own layer (presentation) rather than totally integrated in the application.

Re: Protocol Wars

#65

Post by MisterTea »

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...

I think the real issue is the operating systems did not properly abstract away the APIs, protocols and networks. On plan 9 the dial string is my favorite part of networking because you optionally specify the network in addition to the address and port in the form of a string: net!address!service. To dial an ssh server on port 1234 you run "ssh user@tcp!server.net!1234". The network database (ndb) can then be setup to alias names with protocols or ports so you can omit parts of the dial string for known services e.g. ssh defaults to tcp and port 22. The dial string neatly wraps up the entire network connection into a single string alleviating the program from having to offer command line arguments for port numbers which leaks protocol details into the code making things ugly and difficult to change.

This lets your server take a dial string and listen on any network - even if that network isn't IP! So say you wanted to bring IPX/SPX back from the dead and use it in any program: so you write an IPX/SPX stack that binds over /net, then tell your server to listen on spx!*!555. Now your client also runs an IPX/SPX stack bound over /net and you hand the client program the dial string spx!server!555 and your program starts communicating over IPX/SPX to the server. Done. Want to use connect to an ssh server using quic on plan 9 (Assuming an imaginary quic stack)? just change the dial string to quic!host!port. Done.

Once you use an OS with clean and simple abstractions you are left craving more of it. I wish more people took an interest in building much more radical operating systems.

Re: Protocol Wars

#66

Post by riffic »

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…

you don't understand the power of the Lindy effect. All of the dated infrastructure we have now has ultimately survived the test of time.

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

by the way DNS is wonderful.

Re: Protocol Wars

#68

Post by riffic »

nine_k wrote: post #9
commandersaki wrote: post #7

I really wish we used more technologies coming out of DEC. Only now are we getting stuff like ECN. But I would have really liked to see TUBA be IPv6.

At least we have Windows NT, the spiritual successor to VMS! (Only deep inside, of course.)

if you increment each letter in VMS by one you end up with WNT

Re: Protocol Wars

#69

Post by pclmulqdq »

doctor_eval wrote: post #46
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 wonder if we will see more of the network layer move into the application layer, like what I think happened with QUIC. I’m not really a network guy, but the thing I find interesting about QUIC is that it’s upgradable. Normalising regular browser updates was a godsend for the web, while TCP/IP remains hard to upgrade because you still, in 2023, have to upgrade your whole OS. Protocols like TLS that sit outside the O…

This is where a lot of high-performance stuff went in the last decade or so. HPC, HFT, AI training, several storage services, and clouds pretty much all do their networking in something other than a kernel. It turns out you can get huge performance gains by not using a one-size-fits-all networking system.

It only takes a few more steps for this model to trickle down to general applications, as HTTP and RPC stacks pick it up.

Re: Protocol Wars

#70

Post by mkipper »

eternityforest wrote: post #61
pif wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

"Because it works now" is a perfectly good reason, I was more talking about a hypothetical "wave a wand and change all devices overnight" scenario. I think an IPv8(Apparently we skip odd numbers) could be a real practical thing one day though, because a lot of things really do with quite work that well. The classic "it's always DNS" meme seems to be very real, tying TLS to domains instead of IPs impedes anything on L…

> I think an IPv8(Apparently we skip odd numbers)

A lucky few of us have had the pleasure of working with ST-II, AKA IPv5:

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

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