3 ms·

Millions of people are using it today, one and a half decades after it was conceived. It's not perfect but nothing is. If you have examples of tech to compare

by ay 12y ago

Millions of people are using it today, one and a half decades after it was conceived. It's not perfect but nothing is. If you have examples of tech to compare with - please bring them in! EDIT: and yeah, a lot of knobs does sound like a bit of a poor design, but on the other hand, today, 1.5 decades later, I am grateful I can tweak some of the defaults! Again, if you know something knob-less that'd get flawlessly deployed in 15 years after it was designed - shout, would be very useful to try and learn from that success!

tedunangst 12y ago
The nearest comparison to IPv6 is DNSSEC. IPv6 has done a little better, but that's not saying much. Both suffer from massive over engineering, and lots of false starts and back pedaling over the years. Trying to solve too many problems, and therefore failing to solve the one problem that's of immediate concern.
- ay 12y ago
  Oh, "same as" cases are indeed all over, e.g. the EUI-64 https://standards.ieee.org/develop/regauth/tut/eui64.pdf https://standards.ieee.org/develop/regauth/tut/eui64.pdf I was looking for the example of the sparkly unicorn protocol from 2000 the people seem to evoke, which does not need any knobs and is available on every device to update some other protocol from 1970s. (I suppose the hard meta-question to protocol designers is: how do you make sure your children will not hate you for the protocol you have imposed on them today ?)
  - wbl 12y ago
    UTF-8 updating ASCII is probably the best example of this going well. And even then there was a terrible mistake made in the design of Korean encodings which had to be fixed.
    - taejo 12y ago
      What was the problem with Korean encodings?
      - drdaeman 12y ago
        I have no experience with Korean and Unicode but, I guess, it's jamo composition? With it, there are two distinct and not-really-compatible (since anyone in real world practice rarely cares about Unicode normalization) ways to specify a single Hangul character. And that should make text processing a bit painful.
        jrochkind1 12y ago
        Anyone who writes software to deal with unicode really better care about unicode normalization! You are going to have all sorts of edge case bugs and unexpected behaviors if you don't, definitely not limited to Hangul. There are multiple un-normalized ways to write all sorts of on-screen glyphs, including Latin alphabet ones.
        taejo 12y ago
        I thought wbl meant something to do with the combination of Korean and UTF-8, whereas jamo composition is no more related to UTF-8 than any other unicode encoding.
      - wbl 12y ago
        They moved the Korean encodings at one point in the early 1990's. Luckily this was before anyone used it, but it was still a big mess. I don't know why they had to move it.
    - ay 12y ago
      Both yours and tedunangst example (SSH) have one important commonality which is not present in IP: they become immediately available to two parties as soon as these two parties upgrade. With IP, all the intermediate nodes need to upgrade to use the new protocol (tunneling tricks aside). This difference would probably be a significant factor in the speed of adoption. Tunneling obviously can emulate the 2-party model, but then we're left with the problem of managing the crazy amount of tunnels (and security issues) and sunsetting them. Now if the ideas like http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-vandevelde-idr-remote-next-hop-05 http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-vandevelde-idr-remote-next-... were discovered/implemented a decade ago - could that have been used to turn an N-party transition problem into a 2-party transition problem ?
  - tedunangst 12y ago
    The first version of ssh was released about the same time as the first IPv6 RFC.
    - ay 12y ago
      ...and thanks to the knobs for being able to workaround the day1 bug uncovered just this year in at least one of the widely used vendor's server implementations while getting the fix. But yes, with just 2 parties involved into any instance of the protocol enabling easy upgrade/downgrade path, and tight engineering it is indeed a beautiful protocol.
- sp332 12y ago
  False starts and backpedaling are also known as "iterating". It's disappointing that many of the planned features never got production-ready. But the protocol is now more likely to be implemented than ever before, which is the primary "feature" to which all others are secondary.
tgflynn 12y ago
I would say IPv4 had that property. Not exactly knobless but there are reasons it replaced just about every other networking protocol in existence and simplicity and robustness probably had a lot to do with that. Of course hierarchical routing was a huge feature for the Internet but not necessarily compelling enough to drive out every other LAN protocol.
- xorcist 12y ago
  That's a very bad example. Not only is IPv4 (especially TCP) full of knobs, but it was still in flux 15 years after it's conception.
- josteink 12y ago
  > I would say IPv4 had that property. Not exactly knobless I can tell you haven't tried creating/setting up your own router with NATing, separate subnets (secure, insecure), inbound and outbound VPNs, firewalling and traffic shaping. Or basically anything non-trivial with IP in general. The amount of knobs which you can (and must) set correctly for this thing to fly is enough to give an experienced engineer severe paranoia.
  - tgflynn 12y ago
    Actually I have done most of those things at one time or another. I'm not saying IPv4 is simple (especially if you want to do complex things with it) but it works well when configured correctly and is simple enough to be deployed in businesses of all sizes as well as home networks. I didn't get involved with networking much until shortly after most other protocols were rapidly disappearing but the fact that IPv4 replaced IPX, DECNET, AppleTalk, etc in only a few years time suggests that it probably wasn't that much of a nightmare to set up, even in it's early days. My concern with IPv6, based on this post, is that it may have lost some of the robustness and relative simplicity of IPv4. I mean layer 3 <-> layer 2 address mapping is fundamental to any network and if that's breaking with IPv6 it could be a pretty serious issue.
  - fulafel 12y ago
    IPv4 specs forbid NAT. VPN and firewalling are also counter to the spirit of IP, if not the letter. The internet was designed for end-to-end and works much better if you go along the grain on that.

by ay 12y ago

tedunangst 12y ago

The nearest comparison to IPv6 is DNSSEC. IPv6 has done a little better, but that's not saying much. Both suffer from massive over engineering, and lots of false starts and back pedaling over the years. Trying to solve too many problems, and therefore failing to solve the one problem that's of immediate concern.

ay 12y ago
Oh, "same as" cases are indeed all over, e.g. the EUI-64 https://standards.ieee.org/develop/regauth/tut/eui64.pdf https://standards.ieee.org/develop/regauth/tut/eui64.pdf I was looking for the example of the sparkly unicorn protocol from 2000 the people seem to evoke, which does not need any knobs and is available on every device to update some other protocol from 1970s. (I suppose the hard meta-question to protocol designers is: how do you make sure your children will not hate you for the protocol you have imposed on them today ?)
- wbl 12y ago
  UTF-8 updating ASCII is probably the best example of this going well. And even then there was a terrible mistake made in the design of Korean encodings which had to be fixed.
  - taejo 12y ago
    What was the problem with Korean encodings?
    - drdaeman 12y ago
      I have no experience with Korean and Unicode but, I guess, it's jamo composition? With it, there are two distinct and not-really-compatible (since anyone in real world practice rarely cares about Unicode normalization) ways to specify a single Hangul character. And that should make text processing a bit painful.
      - jrochkind1 12y ago
        Anyone who writes software to deal with unicode really better care about unicode normalization! You are going to have all sorts of edge case bugs and unexpected behaviors if you don't, definitely not limited to Hangul. There are multiple un-normalized ways to write all sorts of on-screen glyphs, including Latin alphabet ones.
      - taejo 12y ago
        I thought wbl meant something to do with the combination of Korean and UTF-8, whereas jamo composition is no more related to UTF-8 than any other unicode encoding.
    - wbl 12y ago
      They moved the Korean encodings at one point in the early 1990's. Luckily this was before anyone used it, but it was still a big mess. I don't know why they had to move it.
  - ay 12y ago
    Both yours and tedunangst example (SSH) have one important commonality which is not present in IP: they become immediately available to two parties as soon as these two parties upgrade. With IP, all the intermediate nodes need to upgrade to use the new protocol (tunneling tricks aside). This difference would probably be a significant factor in the speed of adoption. Tunneling obviously can emulate the 2-party model, but then we're left with the problem of managing the crazy amount of tunnels (and security issues) and sunsetting them. Now if the ideas like http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-vandevelde-idr-remote-next-hop-05 http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-vandevelde-idr-remote-next-... were discovered/implemented a decade ago - could that have been used to turn an N-party transition problem into a 2-party transition problem ?
- tedunangst 12y ago
  The first version of ssh was released about the same time as the first IPv6 RFC.
  - ay 12y ago
    ...and thanks to the knobs for being able to workaround the day1 bug uncovered just this year in at least one of the widely used vendor's server implementations while getting the fix. But yes, with just 2 parties involved into any instance of the protocol enabling easy upgrade/downgrade path, and tight engineering it is indeed a beautiful protocol.
sp332 12y ago
False starts and backpedaling are also known as "iterating". It's disappointing that many of the planned features never got production-ready. But the protocol is now more likely to be implemented than ever before, which is the primary "feature" to which all others are secondary.

tgflynn 12y ago

I would say IPv4 had that property. Not exactly knobless but there are reasons it replaced just about every other networking protocol in existence and simplicity and robustness probably had a lot to do with that. Of course hierarchical routing was a huge feature for the Internet but not necessarily compelling enough to drive out every other LAN protocol.

xorcist 12y ago
That's a very bad example. Not only is IPv4 (especially TCP) full of knobs, but it was still in flux 15 years after it's conception.
josteink 12y ago
> I would say IPv4 had that property. Not exactly knobless I can tell you haven't tried creating/setting up your own router with NATing, separate subnets (secure, insecure), inbound and outbound VPNs, firewalling and traffic shaping. Or basically anything non-trivial with IP in general. The amount of knobs which you can (and must) set correctly for this thing to fly is enough to give an experienced engineer severe paranoia.
- tgflynn 12y ago
  Actually I have done most of those things at one time or another. I'm not saying IPv4 is simple (especially if you want to do complex things with it) but it works well when configured correctly and is simple enough to be deployed in businesses of all sizes as well as home networks. I didn't get involved with networking much until shortly after most other protocols were rapidly disappearing but the fact that IPv4 replaced IPX, DECNET, AppleTalk, etc in only a few years time suggests that it probably wasn't that much of a nightmare to set up, even in it's early days. My concern with IPv6, based on this post, is that it may have lost some of the robustness and relative simplicity of IPv4. I mean layer 3 <-> layer 2 address mapping is fundamental to any network and if that's breaking with IPv6 it could be a pretty serious issue.
- fulafel 12y ago
  IPv4 specs forbid NAT. VPN and firewalling are also counter to the spirit of IP, if not the letter. The internet was designed for end-to-end and works much better if you go along the grain on that.