4 ms·

"Taking IP fragmentation as a particular example: The protocols should be designed such that inability to perform PMTU discovery prevents any connections being

"Taking IP fragmentation as a particular example: The protocols should be designed such that inability to perform PMTU discovery prevents any connections being established at all." You seem to be saying: "I'm right and you are wrong" here and I would suggest that is ill advised - TCP/IP based comms generally work despite ill advised configuration. You can bin ICMP on WAN and yet an OpenVPN connection still works, for example. "Designing protocols which will be robust" - see Internet: all of it. I suggest that the current internet protocols are a shining example of how to do engineering properly.

paloaltokid 9y ago
You know BGP was written on the back of a napkin, right? And no, I am not joking. I would also submit that BGP is not a shining example of well-done engineering.
- aninhumer 9y ago
  That something was written on a napkin doesn't mean anything without context. It could mean someone made something up off the cuff, or it could mean they'd been thinking about it for months and were finally inspired during a meal and didn't want to lose the idea.
  - jimktrains2 9y ago
    Or that it started on a napkin and was refined and flushed out over time.
magila 9y ago
The internet still works without ICMP, until it doesn't. Worse, when it does fail you have no recourse because the network has accumulated a pile of hacks to get 99% of people's use cases working and network operators are not inclined to spend the energy to fix their networks just for you. And so you layer another hack onto the pile and move on, as does everyone else. Not only is the time spent layering hacks on hacks significant, the result is a network which is much less useful because only the most common usage patterns can be expected to work. Want to do something novel? Good luck. See also: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-thomson-postel-was-wrong-01 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-thomson-postel-was-wrong-0...

paloaltokid 9y ago

You know BGP was written on the back of a napkin, right? And no, I am not joking. I would also submit that BGP is not a shining example of well-done engineering.

aninhumer 9y ago
That something was written on a napkin doesn't mean anything without context. It could mean someone made something up off the cuff, or it could mean they'd been thinking about it for months and were finally inspired during a meal and didn't want to lose the idea.
- jimktrains2 9y ago
  Or that it started on a napkin and was refined and flushed out over time.

magila 9y ago

The internet still works without ICMP, until it doesn't. Worse, when it does fail you have no recourse because the network has accumulated a pile of hacks to get 99% of people's use cases working and network operators are not inclined to spend the energy to fix their networks just for you. And so you layer another hack onto the pile and move on, as does everyone else. Not only is the time spent layering hacks on hacks significant, the result is a network which is much less useful because only the most common usage patterns can be expected to work. Want to do something novel? Good luck. See also: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-thomson-postel-was-wrong-01 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-thomson-postel-was-wrong-0...