are there any downsides?
Original article at https://raddle.me/f/wednesday/169488/introducing-the-new-federated-anarchist-networking-protocol
UUCP is a networking protocol that was popular prior to the rise of the commercial Internet and TCP/IP. UUCP has a number of advantages
(implicit in its design) that make it much preferable to TCP/IP for autonomous, distributed communities.
UUCP is a network of loosely-affiliated nodes, which are just computers running the UUCP software. each node is identified by a human-readable
name (there is no numeric addressing system comparable to an IP address)
and each node is only aware of the nodes it is directly connected to.
each node may be connected to any number of other nodes. these
connections can happen over any telecommunications system that supports byte-oriented data transfer; that includes TCP/IP (allowing UUCP to interoperate with the Internet) as well as dial-up lines, leased lines, direct connections (copper or fibre), wireless (radio) links, signals
bounced off the moon, and so on. UUCP nodes are typically not
permanently connected, but establish scheduled temporary connections;
for example a node connected via dial-up might connect to two nodes once
each per day, or a single wireless radio could connect to multiple
wireless peers.
Am 10.09.2023 um 19:49:20 Uhr schrieb Mima-sama:
are there any downsides?
You can't handle mail with UUCP with that many mail servers that
currently exist without some more central servers.
Could you adapt a routing protocol such as OSPF?
On modern CPUs, it should scale to at least 10000 nodes, probably more.
After that, you can start thinking about ways to form a hierarchy. A
bigger problem is that all nodes have to be trustworthy.
If mail is passed alongside news, topology update messages could
already be passed along by the news network, just like newsgroup
control messages are.
On 12/16/23 09:03, immibis wrote:
Could you adapt a routing protocol such as OSPF?
Maybe in concept. But I don't think in practicality.
My understanding of OSPF is that it fundamentally relies on
broadcasts wherein it can send one message and all the other OSPF
peers can receive it.
It uses link-local multicast:
On 12/16/23 13:58, Marco Moock wrote:
It uses link-local multicast:
There is a good chance that clients and / or their NICs, need to
process more of the frame to identify that the frame isn't for them
than they do a unicast frame.
Either way, the ability to speak to multiple recipients on the
network medium is a paradigm that doesn't exist between systems on
separate networks on the Internet today.
If multi-cast was still a thing on the Internet today, sure, but it's
not in any way like it used to be (for testing).
Multicast exactly has that ability to have that decision already when processing the MAC address (the NIC only needs to accept multicast
frames for multicast MAC addresses the devices listens to) and the
dst IP address.
Define network.
Multicast routing is possible, IIRC it should also be
possible between multiple AS,
but as I know, it isn't used very much.That is the rub. Virtually nobody enables support, or explicitly
It least for IPTV it is used inside an AS, at least for Deutsche
Telekom's Magenta TV service.
Yes, multicast works quite well in closed systems, or within an AS.
Crossing the Internet is decidedly not within an AS.
(To Grant: did you mean for your reply to be private, or was it a
fat-finger? I see you posted the same message to the newsgroup 3 hours later.)
I re-read the initial question and I seem to have mis-read it as well.
The problem was: "You can't handle mail with UUCP with that many mail
servers that currently exist without some more central servers."
My interpretation was something along the lines of the years old issue
of needing to source route from the sender to the recipient. For a
while there was effort under way to have UUCP nodes derive a route to
the destination node. My understanding is that this was based on shared data and wasn't automatically discoverable in any sense.
Note that link-state routing of hop-by-hop-routed protocols requires all nodes to compute exactly the same paths to avoid cycles. This may be
another reason the Internet uses path-vector.
Could you adapt a routing protocol such as OSPF?
immibis <news@immibis.com> writes:
Could you adapt a routing protocol such as OSPF?
I remember living with source routing. At its best, it was rather
cool. At its worst, it was tedious. By the end, I mostly just lobbed
my email at ucbvax and let them figure it out.
If your topology doesn't change very often, you can distribute it
as files. This was the UUCP Mapping Project, again one of those
very late-stage things before UUCP went away.
Sysop: | Keyop |
---|---|
Location: | Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, UK |
Users: | 365 |
Nodes: | 16 (2 / 14) |
Uptime: | 00:14:33 |
Calls: | 7,760 |
Calls today: | 3 |
Files: | 12,897 |
Messages: | 5,744,804 |