ProgNet 2004 -- compilerbitch goes to the Lake District...

[compilerbitch]

Comments

[kmazzy.livejournal.com]

erm, do you think everyone should move to that thing that's number 6 to do with IP addresses?

(man i am so clever.... NOT)

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

The general consensus seemed to be that IPv6 would be better than what we're using now, but it's mostly irrelevant due to the advent of network address translation (NAT) which allows many machines to share one globally visible IP address. IPv6 was created because it looked like we were going to run out of IP addresses, but that's now very unlikely indeed, so it's probably not going to change.

Actually, people reckoned that IP itself was the real problem, and that the whole thing needs to be replaced. IP works well, but is very difficult to configure, especially for home users, and is not well suited to newer kinds of network, e.g. ad-hoc wireless networks where individual devices act as repeaters, body area networks, home networks, etc. The dream seems to be that it should be possible to go to PC world/Dixons/Tescos/Mothercare/whereever, come back with a pile of shiny gadgets, turn them on and have them instantly configure themselves and work first time without any button pushing being necessary. A MP3 player should be able to find your Hi-fi via something like Bluetooth, then send your audio straight to the speakers. A PDA should be able to configure itself to use your home WiFi so you can read your email, browse the web or even watch films streamed real time.

Current hardware is potentially capable of all of this without any extra advances, but networking protocols and architectures are lagging behind. It will happen eventually, but IP has a lot of inertia so it won't be sudden.

[kmazzy.livejournal.com]

ah yes... i had heard NAT was the preferred way forward in many people's opinions.

:)

mostly - whooooooooooooooosh over my head though.

[fanf]

Rendezvous is doing that kind of autoconfiguration and autodiscovery now.

A bigger problem is networking in the large - how do you manage the routing for dynamically-reattaching devices and networks?

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Yes, that was all acknowledged as being difficult but worthy of further work.

I have no idea how to fix the problem -- I was only there because the ProgNet is part funding my PhD.

Rendezvous is quite interesting -- I looked at it a few years ago when I was specialising in writing comms code for the financial markets for a living. It was hopelessly expensive (and had not-well-understood scaleability) at the time so we didn't use it in the end.

[mobbsy.livejournal.com]

Could I have a side order of QoS and reliable datagrams with that?

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Yeah, QoS got griped about quite a bit, especially by the wireless ad hoc types.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

NAT is bloody annoying.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

That was something that came up in one of the discussion sessions actually! There was felt to be a need for 'application level arp' that could handle route discovery in any direction through (possibly cascaded) NATs.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I'd rather just have good old globally unique addresses.

[panzerpenguin.livejournal.com]

I hope the food was good anyway. :)

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

The workshop was held in a nice 4 star hotel on the shore of Windermere. And, yes, the food was extremely good! :-)

[sphyg.livejournal.com]

Fraglet = baby Fraggle?

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

That was one workshop paper that was pretty cool, I thought. Fraglets are little bits of executable stack machine code, but with a twist: the execution model is based on chemical reactions. Fraglets 'react' with each other to generate other fraglets, which may possibly get sent across a network.

I have my doubts about efficiency, but the idea is actually quite neat and does lend itself to some reliability problems quite well (e.g. having more than one copy of a particular fraglet in circulation provides natural protection against one copy being damaged).

[sphyg.livejournal.com]

Cool, if a little over my head ;)