3 ms·

Old systems in ports and airports, military systems, anything that has a 50 years shelve life...

by BiteCode_dev 4y ago

UncleOxidant 4y ago
How many old systems like that are connected to the internet and could actually use curl?
- nibbleshifter 4y ago
  Quite many!
- BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  More than you would think, but curl is used to talk to the local network too, or inside VPN as well. Some hacks are quite crazy. E.G: there is this very old navy broacasting protocol, NMEA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NMEA_0183 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NMEA_0183), that was designed so it could be transmitted through old fashion radio waves. You'll find it in some sonars, water sensors or AIS beacons. For this reason, despite that it looks more like a layer 4 protocol, it embeds its own packet format and checksum, all in ASCII, that clients are expected to parse. Now of course, a lot of devices are still emitting their data in NMEA, and it's not uncommon to be able to just telnet or netcat (if UDP) into one to see the data flowing. But after a while, people started to aggregate those data from their numerous sources into one single router, and expose this router for convenience through... HTTP over TCP/IP. And now you have those all those old computer towers (some still rocking a CRT screens or windows xp) doing long polling to get broadcasting data over a protocol that was made for request/reponse, to read the payload that is another protocol that was meant for radio equipment and hence requires manual consistency checks, that is transported by yet another protocol that is doing its best to preserve packets. And they say the spirit of hacking is dead :) (sometimes I feel IoT or domotic stacks look the same honestly) Of course, somewhere in there, there is a curl call. The question is therefore does curl author want to support a potential upgrade path for such twisted use case or not. I would say "nahhhh", but maybe curl had precisely the success it did because the author was ready to support it in crazy settings.
  - still_grokking 4y ago
    But couldn't you just cross compile to such targets? I think nobody really does any serous development on such old machines.
    - BiteCode_dev 4y ago
      Maybe. Or maybe they have the only know toolchain to work installed on this single machine somewhere in the basement (seen in a healthcare corp), or they have a chain of trust that needs way too much effort to verify again (seen in the army), or they are not comptent enough to do such thing (seen in airports), or their whole stack is so old it can only run on this stuff (seen in ports), or their target is exotic and you can't cross compile to it easily (seen in aerospace). Again, not sure that it means curl should endorse such niche situations, but the modes of failure are numerous. TL;DR: the world is complicated
      - still_grokking 4y ago
        I read this as: If there would be real need in almost all cases you could cross compile (the exotic target being the exception). Whether this is feasible in a economic sense is another question. But technical it should be possible.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

Old systems in ports and airports, military systems, anything that has a 50 years shelve life...

UncleOxidant 4y ago

How many old systems like that are connected to the internet and could actually use curl?

nibbleshifter 4y ago
Quite many!
BiteCode_dev 4y ago
More than you would think, but curl is used to talk to the local network too, or inside VPN as well. Some hacks are quite crazy. E.G: there is this very old navy broacasting protocol, NMEA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NMEA_0183 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NMEA_0183), that was designed so it could be transmitted through old fashion radio waves. You'll find it in some sonars, water sensors or AIS beacons. For this reason, despite that it looks more like a layer 4 protocol, it embeds its own packet format and checksum, all in ASCII, that clients are expected to parse. Now of course, a lot of devices are still emitting their data in NMEA, and it's not uncommon to be able to just telnet or netcat (if UDP) into one to see the data flowing. But after a while, people started to aggregate those data from their numerous sources into one single router, and expose this router for convenience through... HTTP over TCP/IP. And now you have those all those old computer towers (some still rocking a CRT screens or windows xp) doing long polling to get broadcasting data over a protocol that was made for request/reponse, to read the payload that is another protocol that was meant for radio equipment and hence requires manual consistency checks, that is transported by yet another protocol that is doing its best to preserve packets. And they say the spirit of hacking is dead :) (sometimes I feel IoT or domotic stacks look the same honestly) Of course, somewhere in there, there is a curl call. The question is therefore does curl author want to support a potential upgrade path for such twisted use case or not. I would say "nahhhh", but maybe curl had precisely the success it did because the author was ready to support it in crazy settings.
- still_grokking 4y ago
  But couldn't you just cross compile to such targets? I think nobody really does any serous development on such old machines.
  - BiteCode_dev 4y ago
    Maybe. Or maybe they have the only know toolchain to work installed on this single machine somewhere in the basement (seen in a healthcare corp), or they have a chain of trust that needs way too much effort to verify again (seen in the army), or they are not comptent enough to do such thing (seen in airports), or their whole stack is so old it can only run on this stuff (seen in ports), or their target is exotic and you can't cross compile to it easily (seen in aerospace). Again, not sure that it means curl should endorse such niche situations, but the modes of failure are numerous. TL;DR: the world is complicated
    - still_grokking 4y ago
      I read this as: If there would be real need in almost all cases you could cross compile (the exotic target being the exception). Whether this is feasible in a economic sense is another question. But technical it should be possible.
deleted 4y ago
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