ProgrammerHumor
packetLoss
Discussion
come on lets lose some packets dad!
son…the pigeons didn’t make it
is this loss
Tom Lehrer just out losing some packets in the park.
The RFC also contains an ascii art of a shitting bird with a comment "Carriers in the queue too long may leave log entries"
That is the IP over Avian Carrier with Quality of Service RFC: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2549.html
RFC 1149: Standard for the transmission of IP datagrams on Avian Carrier is the original: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1149
there is also RFC 6214, which updates it for IPv6 support: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6214
I wish I was so smart that this was my hobby.
My Profressor at university went over the Avian protocol in a lecture just so he could put a question about it on one of our exams.
based
Too bad that image is no longer there
I did my part, yet they removed it again
I'm the firewall and I'm deliberately dropping IPoAC packages here. The coyote then comes to recycle them.
Imagine explaining this kind of packet loss to your boss.
If you use sd cards, the transmission rates are pretty fantastic. It's lossy, and the latency sucks, but you can get 20TB per pigeon (sd cards are 5g ish, can hold 2tb max, and pigeons can carry 50gish of weight)
Much faster than your gigabit ethernet over short distances!
Years ago a journalists sent a pigeon with an sd card to race an isp in South Africa. The pigeon won.
Copying 20TB to microSD cards would take longer than sending it to the destination over fiber
This is one of the many downsides of this approach, yes.
Wouldn't it be better to use unladen swallow. I heard they can carry a coconut over large distances.
Impossible. The swallow ceases to be unladen the instant you laden it.
Joke all you want, but having lived through the 90's in a rural area, pigeons would have been faster than what I subscribed to through america online.
New YouTube tutorial just dropped on addressing Wingspan Load Time race conditions.
Missed the opportunity to call it a Pecket loss
I seem to recall this being based on an RFC that was submitted as an April fools joke.
Ngl the dead pigeon had me laughing. RIP
dramatic staging of packet loss photo got me cackling fr
one pigeon per packet ?
[deleted]
LMAO ded
Kabutar jaja
Bird is the word
Birds aren't real
Anything related to seeds on my torrent transfer? That would explain why it takes forever
Birds farm
The message broker is one mad guy on the rooftop of the company taking care of hundreds of birds
Id like to see it pass through the firewall
Birds aren't real
loss?
The Avian protocol is unironically a great teaching tool for networking concepts. Plus, who doesn't love imagining pigeons as high-speed data carriers?
One of the many perks is that they can carry up to 4 64gb USB sticks per package. No modern computer can match that
Speckled Jim!
I used to work in a shop in college that had to get full system backup data from their northwest Houston office to the college station one. They loaded up a station wagon full of hard drives to copy. They effectively managed a speed of like 100 gb/s based on how much data that they had to move and the time it took them.
I was there from 2006-2008 as a part timer. This story was 10 years old then.
“Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes.” There’s a famous story of doing something similar in Australia, between two distant points, one of which had a very slow connection.
I will never stop loving this.
If you would just get up and teach them instead of handing them a freaking packet, yo
Error correction must be interesting with this. I guess just more pigeons?
Is this fly by wire?
But the TCP handshake just about kills them
Birds aren't real.
Ha, I like to say ping speed of carrier pigeon when my internet is slow.
Where were you during the great H5N1.sys outbreak?
This is what happens when you run Avian protocol over the wrong CAT cable.
Bird Internet
When transferring large amounts of data a bird with a USB stick can be a whole lot faster than fiber optics. It’s not even that stupid.
Perhaps a car or a drone might be a preferrable alternative in an enterprise setting. But yes.
Wait until you hear about the aws Snowmobile (sadly discontinued)
I thought it was called Snowball. We had one to transfer a ton of data to Glacier. When our sys admin told me the name I laughed out loud. Yeah, throw a snowball at the glacier. The image is wonderful.
The snowmobile was the larger sized snowball. It was a 47 foot shipping container capable of holding *petabytes of data.
The snowball was like a suitcase. The snowmobile was a shipping container on a truck
They are even discontinuing snowball.
– Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981
There’s always a relevant Xkcd
I was expecting one cartoon, not a full analysis… But anyway they’re analyzing the application of SneakerWare to the modern capabilities of FedEx, but my question is, what if we utilized existing designs of pneumatic tube systems to continuously deliver parcels of MicroSDs? It could replace data streams to a rate 100x faster.
The only drawback is that to download a movie, you’d have to go to a end delivery node of the tube, or to play games take your PC there. But, we could offer craft & cafe services at the end delivery points on the nexus.
For a really fast way to transfer data, this isn't a bad idea at all. As writing to solid state drives gets faster also, it would be totally feasible to go to a cafe, send a drive off, and come back 30 minutes later with it loaded with your steam/gog/whatever library.
I've always wondered when (if) it's going to become feasible for companies to sell movies on solid state media instead of discs. It would in theory last a lot longer, cost somewhere around the same amount, and be impervious to disk rot
You really heard that senator say "the internet is a series of tubes" and have been fantasizing about that ever since, huh?
Going further, one could build a storage device that's exactly the size of a pneumatic tube capsule and has external connectors for data transfer. Then the tubes could deposit capsules directly into docking stations attached to servers, removing the need for humans to load data by hand. With a software-controlled routing system (which does exist), you could basically do IP-over-pneumatic-tube.
The longest pneumatic tube system I can find with quick Googling was Berlin's pneumatic post at 400 km (250 mi), so I'm not sure you could fully replace the Internet with it, but on a city scale it could potentially work.
I'm guessing it would be practically infeasible, but it would be super fun for a sci-fi setting.
Amazon does that with trucks of storages to move between data centers
They used to. AWS Snowmobile.
Not anymore afaik
Based on (very approximate) napkin math, a standard container carrying LTO-10 tapes can hold a modest 4.7EB (exabyte), before compression.
Wikipedia lists shanghai at 50 millions containers in 2024, meaning it could reach a 7.5EB/s bandwidth. Which is magnitude higher than reported bandwidth for inter continental cables.
Packet loss is also much lower due to shipping lane being relatively well protected world wide.
You forgot to consider tape transfer times. It takes almost 21h to do a full transfer on a single LTO-10 cartridge. So even with a fully decked out library, handling an entire container would take years.
The pigeon beat the car in this test. And both beat Australian internet which isn't a shock as a regular user - though it is better than it was fifteen years ago haha.
https://youtu.be/ci2bFFGM8T8?si=eoiTQENOSPiAFB2Y
IPoCoD
In the early 2000s I used to regularly drive to England and back with 20GB of raw video footage for editing and finished prints on hard disks.
It was way faster than using the eight-grand-a-month E1 line.
tcp vs udp
Here we go again, tech bros trying to reinvent the wheel. We already have pigeons. Might as well put the lazy SOBs to work. They're living off of the sweat off the working man's brow.
Yeah I remember my networking prof telling us how our uni had to move a tone of data from a backup server after a cyber attack.
We were meant to come up with good solutions how to transport these data packages.
The solution (and what our uni had done) was cars xD
Been there at an old job, way before cloud storage was as common. The office was in the basement and there was a massive flood. Some workers pondered if we should wait until the water was drained. Then they could try to get some surviving servers up and running and transfer the data. The rest of us drove to a fishing store to buy fishing outfits. Then we waded through waist-high water, rescued all the hardware that wasn't floating and drove it to the new office. Ngl, that was the best day at the office i've ever had.
It was done in south Africa to demonstrate their crappy speeds.
https://www.theregister.com/2009/09/10/pigeon_v_broadband/
This is reminds me of the clacks race in Discworld - the new technology is the 'clacks', basically semaphore towers linking great distances that transmit messages, and they race a carriage to transmit a book (basically). IIRC it's post office vs clacks.
they made a TV adaptation, iirc same name as the book, "going postal"
highly recommend the TV adaptations, haven't seen a bad one yet
Not if you add the time it takes to copy the data
Copying data can be scaled arbitrarily by simply using multiple drives at once.
Why upload when flock of homing pigeons do trick?
You still have to read and write the data as it comes in so that doesn't change s***
It turned out to be prohibitively expensive in birdfeed to get the pigeons to do that part too.
Fun fact, some cloud providers offer a service to actually bring you physical storage to migrate large amount of data, which will then be moved to their datacenters and imported, instead of transfering hundreds of TB via network.
This benefits both parties and it's indeed the fastest option for very large amount of data.
What if it's just 1 bird tho
Thanks to the storage increase of micro SD cards, a carrier pigeon loaded with them will be faster between any two points on the planet. https://cable.ayra.ch/pigeon/ (I made this in 2019, so you may want to increase the storage capacity of your card). And if you are on a metered connection, you can calculate how expensive that data would be
plus it is more secure, assuming no packet loss of course
Yeah, this has been done https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2009-09-carrier-pigeon-faster-broadband-internet.amp
Carrier pigeon can carry 75 grams, and a microSD card weighs 1/4 of a gram, so a carrier pigeon could carry about 300 of them in a trip. Being that those get up to 2 TB, a pigeon couls theoretically carry 600 TB of data in a single trip, which is bananas.
Instead of USB sticks, just use small high capacity micro-SD cards.
You could send terabytes on a single bird with this technique.
Yes.
One bird down = 10TB of data lost :D ....
Usb transfer like 20mbps (a kinda good one), so no, for most places you could send the data faster than you could put it on a stick, let alone the pidgeon.
Ssd would be insane tho.
And it's immune to electronic warfare
For a time in history, yes.
But right now I can download/upload data faster than I can read/write it from a USB
The real problem is that a homing pigeon will only fly home. So you would need to set up routes with dedicated pigeon service on each direction.
Putting it on your USB is probably not faster than fiber optics, though.