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We've had networks composed of unreliable nodes before - indeed, this assumption is baked into some of our oldest protocols, like email and usenet. All that is
by dTal 3y ago
We've had networks composed of unreliable nodes before - indeed, this assumption is baked into some of our oldest protocols, like email and usenet. All that is required is for at least 2 equally unreliable peers to act as temporary caching servers to bring the effective uptime up from 95% to 99.99% (provided everyone's downtime is uncorrelated).
- drdaeman 3y agoHTTP is different than SMTP or NNTP. A phone could work as a nice personal mailhost, if power management issues could be solved.
- dTal 3y agoIt's true, I was imagining some something more sophisticated than HTTP. But I guess the article wasn't.
- TZubiri 3y agoTrue. The SMTP has provisions that account for the host server being powered off, a personal computer was a reasonable host for this protocol. The sending client is supposed to retry if the receiving server is down.
- duskwuff 3y ago> The SMTP has provisions that account for the host server being powered off But it's still built with the expectation that the recipient host will usually be available, and that unavailability is a transient condition -- a failure to contact the recipient SMTP server is a noisy failure, and, after the first few retries, most servers back off to one attempt every 8 hours. Mail servers which are only sporadically available would require some fairly substantial rearchitecture.
- TZubiri 3y agoNope. It was written to account for personal computers to send mail to personal computers, which could be reasonably powered off nightly. The noisy failure is probably not a part of the standard, more likely a recent trend.
- crazygringo 3y agoWhich is why it works perfectly fine to send e-mail when you're on a plane without WiFi -- it's designed to send once you've got a connection. But the article is about a personal website. Websites run over HTTP, which is not designed for anything unreliable. It's interesting to think about a web that was designed to have lots of intermediary caching peers along the way as part of the protocol, but that's not what we have.
- dredmorbius 3y agoCaching is a thing, as are distributed networks. The notion of mobile-device-as-origin-server which can provide either content in a local context (on a LAN, localhost-only), or globally via cache-and-redundancy / cache-and-forward networks has definite and positive use-cases.