How engineers at Digital Equipment Corp. saved Ethernet

Post by _factor » Tue, Apr 09, 2024, 1:40 AM UTC

Alupis wrote: post #27

themerone wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a surprising number of people who think you could magically expand the IPv4 address space in a backwards compatible manner.

I believe it's more along the lines of the concepts in IPv4 are easier to grasp than IPv6, starting with the actual addresses themselves. IPv6 breaks all backwards compatibility. So, it's not unreasonable for people to ask why we can't just break it in a more familiar way? Extending IPv4 into say, IPv7 and using familiar addressing schemes, well understood routing/NAT/DHCP techniques, etc, while providing the same us…

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Apr 09, 2024, 1:50 AM UTC

inopinatus wrote: post #48

gumby wrote: post #2

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…

Post by itemize » Tue, Apr 09, 2024, 2:01 AM UTC

beachy wrote: post #58

Solvency wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That last paragraph is literally the same basic sentence about "little steps" written three times in slightly different ways. Did you get this quote from an AI written SEOspam site?

Ha ha, it came from Wikipedia so possibly.

Post by Dylan16807 » Tue, Apr 09, 2024, 2:08 AM UTC

ianburrell wrote: post #62

Dylan16807 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fc00::7 is the ULA range. It is not reserved. It is the right range to use for an internal network. There is no reason to prefer fc00 over fd00. fc00::/7 is the ULA range. It is made out of two halves. fc00::/8 and fd00::/8 fc00::/8 is reserved. People are only allowed to use fd00::/8 > fec0 is the site-local addresses. Nobody should be assigning addresses in that range since they are made automatically. Using site…

I don't know that about ULA range. I got fe80 and fec0 confused. It looks like the latter is the deprecated site-local range. It is unlikely that will be reassigned, but lots of people said the same with IPv4 and got burned. It is safer to use ULA.

Post by inopinatus » Tue, Apr 09, 2024, 2:23 AM UTC

ianburrell wrote: post #35

rini17 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this was what literally happened. All routers today support NAT and most of them actively use it. Isn't it a magical form of extended IPv4 address space? Could have been easily done in less band-aid fashion instead of chasing IPv6.

It is impossible to address hosts behind NAT. Only the public IPv4 address is visible. It might have been possible to extend IPv4 by having each NAT hop add the internal IPv4 address as option header. Then it would be possible to refer to inside host directly with a list of addresses. That isn't worth doing now because it would require rewriting everything to deal with the new protocol. For one thing, lots of NAT box…