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packetLoss
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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.
I remember realizing that if we solve FTL travel before FTL communications, IPoAC would be a viable solution to interplanetary Internet.
Imagine, star truckers hauling encrypted petabytes of data from planet to planet along with their physical cargo. They plug in at the starport while refueling, and upload their data to an endpoint where emails and data for local web proxies gets distributed automatically.
That's actually valid. If we are able to warp objects and not radio waves, then physical transfer of data would be the only option.
honestly, seeing how Star Wars is always passing around physical storage devices instead of just beaming terabytes of data everywhere, this makes a lot of sense
It turns out that RFC 6214 were already implemented before it was written. Basically the original RFC 1149 implementation just used the standard Linux network stack. And they had used one of the first versions of Linux with IPv6 support. We did have some issues when testing RFC 6214 on the original hardware though, but it was found out to be a bug in the Linux stack regarding IPv6 ping. UDP worked great.
Haha! "Log" entries 🤣
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
Do you remember what the question was?
What is the transfer velocity of an Unladen Swallow?
European or African?
I don't know that!
Aaaaaaarrrgghhh...
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.
Too bad that image is no longer there
I did my part, yet they removed it again
Sadly they formed a consensus on the talk that it shouldn't be there. Not worth wasting maintainers time over
I mean, they were offended by having a dead bird in the article. So, just do it in a drawing style! It was a fun little gag, and I'm sad that they keep removing it.
They are idiots. There is a LOT worse stuff on wikipedia than a dead bird. That image was iconic and should be brought back
Agreed. I vote to bring it back, even if it means in another style.
Actually, in the talk article's RFC, someone suggested using a drawing of a dead bird instead, but that was also rejected
What..!? That image was iconic. We all should push to restore the image on the page
The original implementation of the protocol that experienced packet loss didn't have dead pigeons reported. The pigeons just didn't arrive, and some arrived without packets.
https://blug.linux.no/rfc1149/writeup/
https://web.archive.org/web/20130531075408/http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/vegard_bilder/index.html
It doesn't make sense to take a picture unrelated to the implementation of the protocol.
I'm the firewall and I'm deliberately dropping IPoAC packages here. The coyote then comes to recycle them.
i am the packet sniffer, now i have the bird flu .
Imagine explaining this kind of packet loss to your boss.
And your boss resents hiring all these remote workers who only speak pigeon English.
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.
Jokes on you: There was a German video about slow internet. They compared the internet speed with a ridden horse. And no, this was not in the 90s, the video is 4 years old.
Das Internet ist für uns alle Neuland!
A pigeon with a 2TB micro SD card still gets a pretty decent upload speed.
That actually describes family trips as a kid quite well. Whenever we went somewhere, id setup my laptop to download on the hotels internet pretty much constantly the whole time.
Sneakernet was a real thing in the city in the early 90s too. We'd much rather share floppy disks in the playground than try to transfer stuff through a BBS on a 14.4k modem.
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.
African or European?
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.
New YouTube tutorial just dropped on addressing Wingspan Load Time race conditions.
I seem to recall this being based on an RFC that was submitted as an April fools joke.
RFC 1149. And it was actually implemented.
Yeah, there are joke RFCs published on April fools every year.
This year we got RFC 9759: "Unified Time Scaling for Temporal Coordination Frameworks"
Speckled Jim!
Ngl the dead pigeon had me laughing. RIP
[deleted]
Kabutar jaja
One of the many perks is that they can carry up to 4 64gb USB sticks per package. No modern computer can match that
Bird is the word
But the TCP handshake just about kills them
Pretty much
$ ping -c 9 -i 900 10.0.3.1
PING 10.0.3.1 (10.0.3.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=6165731.1 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=255 time=3211900.8 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=255 time=5124922.8 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=6388671.9 ms
--- 10.0.3.1 ping statistics ---
9 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 55% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 3211900.8/5222806.6/6388671.9 ms
$ ping -c 9 -i 900 10.0.3.1
PING 10.0.3.1 (10.0.3.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=6165731.1 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=255 time=3211900.8 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=255 time=5124922.8 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=6388671.9 ms
--- 10.0.3.1 ping statistics ---
9 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 55% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 3211900.8/5222806.6/6388671.9 ms
Where were you during the great H5N1.sys outbreak?
There's an edition war and then vote on Wikipedia to keep or remove that image and they voted to remove it last time I checked.
I think that actually is my isp in the pic
I think there's an XKCD about this, involving a milk jug full of micro SDs
Never mind there is IP over avian carriers with quality of service: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2549
The edit wars over whether that photo should appear are legendary.
one pigeon per packet ?
Missed the opportunity to call it a Pecket loss
dramatic staging of packet loss photo got me cackling fr
Anything related to seeds on my torrent transfer? That would explain why it takes forever
Birds farm
Id like to see it pass through the firewall
For that you would need a phoenix, not a pigeon.
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?
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?
Birds aren't real.
Ha, I like to say ping speed of carrier pigeon when my internet is slow.
This is what happens when you run Avian protocol over the wrong CAT cable.
Bird Internet
Is this (packet) Loss?
Somehow I laughed at a picture of a dead pigeon this morning.
Legend says the real bottleneck was when the pigeon stopped for snacks mid-transfer..
Now what about carry a 1TB SSD with Cessna 172 500km away
Holy shit, it's a real thing and they really did implement it too. 🤯🤯🤯 Wtf
Yeah, it has been described in RFC 1149, in RFC 2549 they added QoS, and in 2011, with RFC 6214 they finally implemented IPv6
Still more reliable than Quest
Can you believe those fuckers are still around??
Reminds me of the ancient saying: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
Three more pictures and you could represent the whole Loss
Lol
Imagine an internal network where they are just throwing pigeons with hard drives indoor from desk to desk xD
Have you ever listened to the song, Paper Pings?
Sneakernet Feathernet
Buffer overflow
Bird internet
Is this a winged extention of the SneakerNet protocol?
Don't do udp over ipoac though.
Where can I learn more about this? I have an edge case that could benefit from this.
I can't believe it's not Loss.
What about a datagram segmentation
Fools. Don’t they know birds aren’t real? 😝
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
you can still get a Snowball Edge
yes that’s the real name of the product
There was also Snowcone (up to 8TB, I think), but it was discontinued last November.
There are also variants of the Snowball Edge. I've already forgotten lol
They are even discontinuing snowball.
Iirc they still have snowball, but they're closing snowcone and Snowmobile.
I don’t want to re-certify in this bs lol. “Snowcone”
Lol I certified in Jan and now you gotta learn their AI shit too
azure does the same with their Azure Data Box
You mean AWS Snowball and Snowcone? They still exist and are used to this day for petabyte scale transfers
– 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.
You really heard that senator say "the internet is a series of tubes" and have been fantasizing about that ever since, huh?
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
I’ve always known discs (ie: DVDs, Blu-ray, etc) to last longer than solid state media (ie: flash drives), but I don’t have a source to provide you with.
SD cards absolutely do not last longer. Unpowered, they start to pick up unrecoverable errors in ~2 years or so.
Better flash is rated for longer lifetimes, but it also gets much more expensive fast.
It's not movies, but Nintendo has been doing it for a bit already with their games. Switch game cards are a proprietary format of SD card, and SD cards are a form of solid state media. I do expect that it'll become a more common practice in the coming years, but so far I'm not aware of anyone else doing it.
For movies, I figure the biggest hurdle is not actually the media format itself, but the need to transition into a different type of playback device to use it.
SneakerNet
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.
I once had to suggest this as a serious proposal since we were trying to clear out our local storage from a bunch of CFD sims.
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.
I may have conveniently forgot that :)
Yes and no. If you were to lose a whole ship that is a lot of packets lost.
Amazon does that with trucks of storages to move between data centers
They used to. AWS Snowmobile.
Not anymore afaik
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.
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
It's better until you see hackers camping on the roof of the building with nets
tcp vs udp
IPoCoD
Cars are prone to traffic. Drones are prone to electromagnetic interference in war conditions. For the highest standards of security, I foresee military avian carriers with USB sticks to deliver data just like in WW1.
Write this down. Its gonna happen.
Not even close. Pigeons are multiple times more efficient at flight than pigeon.
But in all seriousness if throughout is so much of a problem you probably need trucks. Like cern where they long term store data on magnetic tapes and then move them around on trucks if necessary.
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.
more expensive to run
bird drones duh
Depending on the circumstance, you can actually have your ISP lease you a dedicated route for huge data transfers. This is usually significantly faster than doing it through regular channels, but it’s a lot more expensive. The alternative is to load the data onto trucks. This is usually the cheapest way, but it takes a couple days to do the transfer.
Pigeons are definitely more eco-friendly
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.
AWS can send semi trucks packed with networked hard drives to businesses trying to move to AWS. Each truck can store up to 100 petabytes of data.
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
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.
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?
The bottleneck isn't the drive, it's the USB connection.
It turned out to be prohibitively expensive in birdfeed to get the pigeons to do that part too.
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.
You can also just release multiple carrier pigeons at the same time too, so it scales really well too.
What do you mean? An African or a European pigeon?
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
Real world example, in order to compile the world's first direct image of a black hole, researchers across the globe mailed hard drives to each other rather than transferred data online because it was faster.
Instead of USB sticks, just use small high capacity micro-SD cards.
You could send terabytes on a single bird with this technique.
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.
usb3 can transfer at 20Gbps, and usb4 can transfer at 40Gbps
Really high transfer speeds, really shit ping. We were also taught this in like the introductory lecture for computer networks. "Man with car" can transfer more data in the same time than optic fiber pretty much every time.
It's my favorite example of the difference between bandwidth and latency. A truckload of SSDs is extremely high bandwidth but also extremely high latency.
In large data transfers, throwing a harddrive on a truck has been a standard for a long fuckin' time.
Throughput isn't the issue. Latency is. TCP handshakes involve a lot of small, back and forth exchanges, as do the higher level protocols built on top of them.
E.g., the TLS protocol that occurs at the transport layer, or HTTP at the application layer: these not only involve rapid, back and forth exchanges, but often have a timeout between request and response, whether in the protocol itself, or in practice.
For example, in practice, a common server or load balancer or gateway or similar isn't going to wait longer than a minute for a TLS handshake, and will close the connection after a few minutes. Most client HTTP libraries will do likewise.
For a time in history, yes.
But right now I can download/upload data faster than I can read/write it from a USB
Solely depends on the USB standard and drives used, no?
Putting it on your USB is probably not faster than fiber optics, though.
What if it's just 1 bird tho
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
And it's immune to electronic warfare
That's only kinda sorta true if we use a narrow definition of electronic.
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.
Given how much data a USB or SIM card can carry nowadays, a not insignificant portion of the time is probably spent transferring data from the storage device to the computer rather than pigeon flight time.
hmm how many bytes can a pigeon reasonably carry? With TB size micro sd cards, could be quite a lot...
Should we bring back pneumatic tubes?
Well considering birds are actually spy drones it's not crazy at all. r/birdsarentreal
According to some random article I found 4TB is the max size currently available in usb. Fiber optic currently reaches up to 10Gbps for the highest commercially available product. So for 4TB it needs 53m 20s. A pigeon flies at 100kph (27mps). So up to a didtance of 88.88... km (assuming instantly reaching and breaking from 100kph, so less in reality) the pigeon is faster. Anything longer range fiber optics are
But that information still needs to be transferred from the USB to the PC, and the speed of the USB would likely be slower than the speed of the computer anyways
Why won't we replace fiber optics with tubes to send USBs/HDDs/SSDs through?
Amazon literally has a service that can move data by a truck :)
Yeah, but it needs to be a bloody fast bird, and an even faster USB drive. Realistically, an NVMe drive inside a Thunderbolt 4 enclosure would be ideal.