Jonathan Rosenberg wrote:
Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
While I disagree with Jonathan's assertion that we should insert an
entirely useless (for all but NAT) UDP header in front of all new
protocols we design,
Well, I'd hardly characterize, "allowing it to work across the public
Internet" as a property that is useless. Statements like, "useless for
all but NAT" trivialize what the Internet has evolved into. There is NAT
everywhere. Lets accept it and design for what the Internet is, and not
for the Internet as we wish it would be.
You may not like it, but its reality.
Well, if we're talking about reality, why don't we talk about UDP?
UDP is an imperfect fit for NAT's and firewalls because it's stateless
and the stateful ALG needs to educe state from those packets. If
it's an protocol riding on top of UDP, the ALG is bound to get it wrong
at times. Which as far as I've heard happens all the time. As in, UDP
is no panacea.
If you really want to put a stake in the ground here, it seems to me that
TCP is on a lot firmer ground. Why else would a lot of these IM protocols
and things like Skype use TCP fallback? It's because it's the only thing
that reliably works and they're not in the business of navel gazing about
whether they shouldn't do that because of its architectural ugliness.
More heresy: maybe we should work on hacks to TCP to allow it to
have non-reliable e2e delivery so that it was more friendly to real time
protocols built on top of it.
Mike
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