4 ms·

It's not great. It reads like some angsty nerd who really doesn't like the idea of something and has spent an inordinate amount of time trying to explain why it

It's not great. It reads like some angsty nerd who really doesn't like the idea of something and has spent an inordinate amount of time trying to explain why it's wrong and why his solution is better. Sometimes that works, if your name is Locke or Marx or something, but this writing really doesn't say "genius" to me. Moreover, I have not heard anyone but myself utter the word "OSI" out loud in 8 or 10 years. Maybe it's still a thing in academia, but it's not in corporate or open source worlds. I don't know if I've met more than 2 people in 5 years that know how TCP works. It's just a magic tunnel that HTTP somehow uses under the covers. So I really don't get the need or purpose for this document. It's like describing in excruciating detail that what you know about the ancient Egyptians is a lie, because that's somehow going to be necessary for somebody?

tptacek 3y ago
I sort of agree that "OSI" is really weakening his argument, and that he could take clearer aim at the classical Internet layering model (network, transport, application) --- even that simple layering is obsolete now. But it'd still be a straw man! We even run DNS over HTTP at this point.
- derefr 3y ago
  I think that the "OSI" he's speaking about isn't an engineering tool, a thing people would use to construct systems; rather, this "OSI" is a way of modelling systems that exist — systems that, of course, were not implemented by people thinking about OSI. It's an analytical modelling tool, a thing applied to a system retrospectively in an attempt to understand it, break it down along abstract rather than concrete lines. Like the various flavors of literary criticism. Except in the case of OSI, it's not a reputable analytical tool from the perspective of actual academics; it's rather a discredited one. Instead, it's only lay-people with an outdated view of the state-of-scientific-practice who attempt to apply the discredited tool. And this article is an attempt to get those lay-people to stop doing that. Compare/contrast how the layman may often think that Freudian psychoanalysis is still in use in psychiatry — and may even try to apply it themselves to understand someone's motivations. Much to the chagrin of psychiatrists.
  - robertgraham 3y ago
    Yea, it's not about engineers constructing systems. I mean, engineers do frequently pretend their creations fit the OSI model, but they work backwards to make it appear to conform to orthodoxy. The issue is about education. People teach the model, or some variation of it. It teaches misconceptsion, such as how Ethernet and the Internet are integrated in a single network stack rather than being independent networks. It leads to professionals in IT and cybersecurity who continue to hold this misconception.
    - derefr 3y ago
      > It teaches misconceptsion, such as how Ethernet and the Internet are integrated in a single network stack rather than being independent networks. It really opened up a whole world of understanding for me when I decided to go look up "RFC 1" to see what it was about. Reading that — and the few low-numbered RFCs after it — made me realize that "the birth of the Internet" as we know it, was essentially the moment of the deployment of the first network switch (the BB&N IMP), isolating physical networks' electrical properties and collision domains from one-another and using DSPs to arbitrarily re-write packets between different signalling standards — thus rendering uniformity of physical/electrical media and LAN signalling standards, completely irrelevant. Until that moment, I had always thought of "the Internet" as a standard for LAN networking that grew like a social network until it overtook the world — where things like "Ethernet" and "TCP/IP" were the "Internet flavor" (DARPA flavor?) of those LAN-networking technologies; where "the Internet" was competing with other LAN technology suites, the likes of ChaosNet or AppleTalk or NetBEUI; where people gradually "switched over" from using whatever networking equipment and signalling protocols they had been using, to using Internet networking equipment and standards; and where the fact that people were finally settling on the same networking protocols across multiple Autonomous Systems, allowed them to finally yolk those systems together into inter-networks, with more and more of that happening until we had one big hierarchical LAN called The Internet. But no! The whole clever thing about "The Internet" is that it didn't do that! It just took all the random proprietary networks that people had built, and connected them together as black boxes, by coming up with a set of standards for how the networks would speak to one-another at their border gateways, and leaving everything else up to implementation, with the assumption of border-gateway routers being implemented by each LAN-technology-vendor to translate between "Internet" signalling and whatever that LAN was doing! And, in that view, the whole "layer separation" concept — of there being such a thing as an "IP packet" that bubbles up to userland separately from any delivery enveloping — wasn't fundamental to The Internet; in fact, existing protocols that were vertically integrated continued to work, being rewritten into something else when they reached the AS border gateway. The "layer separation" was an optimization to allow new "post-Internet" protocols to be passed "transparently" across AS border gateways without those gateways needing to know about them to rewrite them. Rather, these "post-Internet" protocols, consisting of separate "LAN envelope" and "Internet payload" parts — and designed with trancieving logic on the endpoints such that the "Internet payload" could traverse the [lossy, laggy] Internet intact — could simply be re-enveloped from "LAN packets" into "Internet packets." And the responsibility for constructing/parsing the "LAN envelope" part would be taken away from userland, made the responsibility of the OS, so that "post-Internet" applications could be portable between computers that used different LAN technologies but wanted to speak the same Internet protocols. But, of course, network stacks continued to support non-layer-separated communication for decades afterward the advent of The Internet; and AS border gateways continued to support rewriting these protocols "at the edge" for just as long. It wasn't until much later that LAN networking equipment truly became commoditized. (I have a Windows 2000 manual that describes its support for token-ring networking. Windows 2000!) In a fully post-Internet era, when everyone is using Internet protocols, a "network" could no longer offer much to differentiate itself. So we started to see shifts to actually standardize on LAN technologies, with vendors all moving toward making the same stuff. At that point, border gateways began getting simpler, and companies like Cisco that had made their fortune in the AS-border-gateway space stopped being household names, instead being relegated to the NOC (as they had successfully pivoted into dumb-but-high-throughput enterprise LAN switching, and even-dumber-but-even-higher-throughput Internet backbone switching.)
- aidenn0 3y ago
  I don't see DoH as any more of an issue for describing the layers than PPPoE is.
duskwuff 3y ago
> Maybe it's still a thing in academia, but it's not in corporate or open source worlds. Counterpoint: DDoS attacks are routinely described as "layer 3" or "layer 7" attacks. And if you're in the kind of industry that goes in for certifications, the OSI model comes up pretty frequently in networking exams, especially at the entry level.
candiddevmike 3y ago
Enterprise networking still exists, and most things still fit in the OSI model for the most part (MPLS/"layer 2.5" had already broke the model kinda, exceptions can be made). It's really unfortunate that folks have stopped learning about it. It makes troubleshooting connectivity issues so much easier and collective knowledge of OSI helps immensely with triage and communication.
thayne 3y ago
Terminology like "layer 4", "layer 7" and sometimes "layer 3" is often used in documentation for things like load balancers, vpns or other tunnels, etc. As a specific example the documentation is for layers is split into layers 4-7 that roughly sort of match the OSI model. Except not really, because the OSI model doesn't really math tcp/ip. And the first feature listed on the overview page for an AWS ALB is that it does "Layer-7 Load Balancing". I have no idea why we continue to use thes numbers instead of saying the protocols or a more descriptive name, like transpory layer or application layer.
- Karrot_Kream 3y ago
  I try and use "application layer" and "transport layer" myself but find that people don't really understand what I mean but for some reason understand "layer 4" and "layer 7" (and sadly yeah, occasionally "layer 3".) I still insist in documents in using descriptive layer names but usually in conversation just refer to load balancers or proxies.
- somat 3y ago
  It is worse with drive arrays. The original UC Berkeley RAID project enumerated several possible configurations of drives. Unfortunately the numbers they used to represent their configurations entered the vernacular when we probably should have been using the names. Now it is a complete mess.
kiitos 3y ago
I definitely have used the OSI model in all of my corporate jobs for my entire career.

tptacek 3y ago

I sort of agree that "OSI" is really weakening his argument, and that he could take clearer aim at the classical Internet layering model (network, transport, application) --- even that simple layering is obsolete now. But it'd still be a straw man! We even run DNS over HTTP at this point.

derefr 3y ago
I think that the "OSI" he's speaking about isn't an engineering tool, a thing people would use to construct systems; rather, this "OSI" is a way of modelling systems that exist — systems that, of course, were not implemented by people thinking about OSI. It's an analytical modelling tool, a thing applied to a system retrospectively in an attempt to understand it, break it down along abstract rather than concrete lines. Like the various flavors of literary criticism. Except in the case of OSI, it's not a reputable analytical tool from the perspective of actual academics; it's rather a discredited one. Instead, it's only lay-people with an outdated view of the state-of-scientific-practice who attempt to apply the discredited tool. And this article is an attempt to get those lay-people to stop doing that. Compare/contrast how the layman may often think that Freudian psychoanalysis is still in use in psychiatry — and may even try to apply it themselves to understand someone's motivations. Much to the chagrin of psychiatrists.
- robertgraham 3y ago
  Yea, it's not about engineers constructing systems. I mean, engineers do frequently pretend their creations fit the OSI model, but they work backwards to make it appear to conform to orthodoxy. The issue is about education. People teach the model, or some variation of it. It teaches misconceptsion, such as how Ethernet and the Internet are integrated in a single network stack rather than being independent networks. It leads to professionals in IT and cybersecurity who continue to hold this misconception.
  - derefr 3y ago
    > It teaches misconceptsion, such as how Ethernet and the Internet are integrated in a single network stack rather than being independent networks. It really opened up a whole world of understanding for me when I decided to go look up "RFC 1" to see what it was about. Reading that — and the few low-numbered RFCs after it — made me realize that "the birth of the Internet" as we know it, was essentially the moment of the deployment of the first network switch (the BB&N IMP), isolating physical networks' electrical properties and collision domains from one-another and using DSPs to arbitrarily re-write packets between different signalling standards — thus rendering uniformity of physical/electrical media and LAN signalling standards, completely irrelevant. Until that moment, I had always thought of "the Internet" as a standard for LAN networking that grew like a social network until it overtook the world — where things like "Ethernet" and "TCP/IP" were the "Internet flavor" (DARPA flavor?) of those LAN-networking technologies; where "the Internet" was competing with other LAN technology suites, the likes of ChaosNet or AppleTalk or NetBEUI; where people gradually "switched over" from using whatever networking equipment and signalling protocols they had been using, to using Internet networking equipment and standards; and where the fact that people were finally settling on the same networking protocols across multiple Autonomous Systems, allowed them to finally yolk those systems together into inter-networks, with more and more of that happening until we had one big hierarchical LAN called The Internet. But no! The whole clever thing about "The Internet" is that it didn't do that! It just took all the random proprietary networks that people had built, and connected them together as black boxes, by coming up with a set of standards for how the networks would speak to one-another at their border gateways, and leaving everything else up to implementation, with the assumption of border-gateway routers being implemented by each LAN-technology-vendor to translate between "Internet" signalling and whatever that LAN was doing! And, in that view, the whole "layer separation" concept — of there being such a thing as an "IP packet" that bubbles up to userland separately from any delivery enveloping — wasn't fundamental to The Internet; in fact, existing protocols that were vertically integrated continued to work, being rewritten into something else when they reached the AS border gateway. The "layer separation" was an optimization to allow new "post-Internet" protocols to be passed "transparently" across AS border gateways without those gateways needing to know about them to rewrite them. Rather, these "post-Internet" protocols, consisting of separate "LAN envelope" and "Internet payload" parts — and designed with trancieving logic on the endpoints such that the "Internet payload" could traverse the [lossy, laggy] Internet intact — could simply be re-enveloped from "LAN packets" into "Internet packets." And the responsibility for constructing/parsing the "LAN envelope" part would be taken away from userland, made the responsibility of the OS, so that "post-Internet" applications could be portable between computers that used different LAN technologies but wanted to speak the same Internet protocols. But, of course, network stacks continued to support non-layer-separated communication for decades afterward the advent of The Internet; and AS border gateways continued to support rewriting these protocols "at the edge" for just as long. It wasn't until much later that LAN networking equipment truly became commoditized. (I have a Windows 2000 manual that describes its support for token-ring networking. Windows 2000!) In a fully post-Internet era, when everyone is using Internet protocols, a "network" could no longer offer much to differentiate itself. So we started to see shifts to actually standardize on LAN technologies, with vendors all moving toward making the same stuff. At that point, border gateways began getting simpler, and companies like Cisco that had made their fortune in the AS-border-gateway space stopped being household names, instead being relegated to the NOC (as they had successfully pivoted into dumb-but-high-throughput enterprise LAN switching, and even-dumber-but-even-higher-throughput Internet backbone switching.)
aidenn0 3y ago
I don't see DoH as any more of an issue for describing the layers than PPPoE is.

duskwuff 3y ago

> Maybe it's still a thing in academia, but it's not in corporate or open source worlds. Counterpoint: DDoS attacks are routinely described as "layer 3" or "layer 7" attacks. And if you're in the kind of industry that goes in for certifications, the OSI model comes up pretty frequently in networking exams, especially at the entry level.

candiddevmike 3y ago

Enterprise networking still exists, and most things still fit in the OSI model for the most part (MPLS/"layer 2.5" had already broke the model kinda, exceptions can be made). It's really unfortunate that folks have stopped learning about it. It makes troubleshooting connectivity issues so much easier and collective knowledge of OSI helps immensely with triage and communication.

thayne 3y ago

Terminology like "layer 4", "layer 7" and sometimes "layer 3" is often used in documentation for things like load balancers, vpns or other tunnels, etc. As a specific example the documentation is for layers is split into layers 4-7 that roughly sort of match the OSI model. Except not really, because the OSI model doesn't really math tcp/ip. And the first feature listed on the overview page for an AWS ALB is that it does "Layer-7 Load Balancing". I have no idea why we continue to use thes numbers instead of saying the protocols or a more descriptive name, like transpory layer or application layer.

Karrot_Kream 3y ago
I try and use "application layer" and "transport layer" myself but find that people don't really understand what I mean but for some reason understand "layer 4" and "layer 7" (and sadly yeah, occasionally "layer 3".) I still insist in documents in using descriptive layer names but usually in conversation just refer to load balancers or proxies.
somat 3y ago
It is worse with drive arrays. The original UC Berkeley RAID project enumerated several possible configurations of drives. Unfortunately the numbers they used to represent their configurations entered the vernacular when we probably should have been using the names. Now it is a complete mess.

kiitos 3y ago

I definitely have used the OSI model in all of my corporate jobs for my entire career.