5 ms·
Man, not putting Fully Qualified Domain Names in code has been such a recurring source of pain in my software life. You make so many assumptions about the way p
by josh2600 4y ago
Man, not putting Fully Qualified Domain Names in code has been such a recurring source of pain in my software life. You make so many assumptions about the way people parse domain names and all of them are wrong. Vendors do all kinds of things to "simplify" their workflows internally and sometimes they just parse URLs and domains in all kinds of ways that break your brain.
Reminds me so much of the way "smart" telecom engineers bastardized SS7 to ship new features onto legacy telco infrastructure. SS7 is like 20M lines of C. You can't really change it without breaking it in many other places, AT&T used to have a metric which was something like "for every 10 lines of code you alter in SS7, you create 8 bugs in other parts of the code." So "smart" telecom engineers would take existing fields in the SS7 logic and use them for different functions inside of their telco. A billing field could instead be used as a feature flag for some sort of customer state, but only inside of the telco's network (and re-written back to the compliant SS7 standard when the data was headed out of the network). This was called encapsulation and wrapping and un-wrapping packets just in time was the source of many many problems in my telecom life.
Just in time editing of network packets at the boundary is always fun. Most of the problems that would happen would come from forgetting to rewrite back to SS7 and transmitting the internal codes out.
- notpushkin 4y agoI'm wondering why telcos don't use SIP (and something with sane APIs for the data / control plane) or something internally? Maybe for peering with other networks, too.
- josh2600 4y agoOk so like… think about telcos vs say, whatsapp. WhatsApp is sip, it uses srtp, the whole 9 yards. It works way better than telcos… BUT!!! It rides over telco rails. This is the dirty truth. What we think of as telco is evolving. Telco is desperately trying not to be a “dumb pipe”, but that’s exactly what the internet wants the base layer to be. When the base layer is opinionated, bad things happen, like net neutrality. What we want is unbiased fast networks that route data indiscriminately as long as it is correctly formatted and sent from a known address. That’s it. Everything else is just vanity.
- notpushkin 4y agoBut telcos can still run voice traffic over “sane” protocols (VoLTE and VoWIFI, for example, are both wrappers over SIP if I'm not mistaken – pretty complex, but still using modern tech). They don't have to be “dumb pipes”, but I don't think there's any need to claw into complicated legacy stuff any more than it is needed to interact with legacy systems. Totally agree with the what we want part.
- phh 4y ago> VoLTE and VoWIFI, for example, are both wrappers over SIP if I'm not mistaken Not wrappers. VoLTE is literally SIP with extensions. And VoWiFi is literally VoLTE over IPSec/IKE with EAP auth, so SIP over IPSec. Really just bog standard stuffs. > – pretty complex, but still using modern tech Not sure about "modern", but yeah pretty much every actor uses SIP one way or another. It does have a few old stuff (one SIP extension of VoLTE is to allow SIP-negotiated IPSec tunnel. For HMAC it supports md5-96 and sha1-96 and that's all.), but nothing that makes you scream of over-complication.
- josh2600 4y agoYeah VoLTE and VoWiFi were just getting rolled out when I left telecom. It was all IMS and hacks on top of SS7 and stuff like that. WhatsApp really applied a ton of pressure to telcos and changed the game. Do you remember they an international sms in the US was $.60 per message before whatsapp?
- notpushkin 4y agoWell, relatively modern of course (2000 v. 1981 for SS7 :-)