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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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
[deleted]
LMAO ded
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
Speckled Jim!
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
Ngl the dead pigeon had me laughing. RIP
one pigeon per packet ?
Missed the opportunity to call it a Pecket loss
Birds aren't real
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
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
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.
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
Is this (packet) Loss?
Somehow I laughed at a picture of a dead pigeon this morning.
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.
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
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
– 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.
SneakerNet
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.
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
IPoCoD
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.
tcp vs udp
It's better until you see hackers camping on the roof of the building with nets
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.
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?
The bottleneck isn't the drive, it's the USB connection.
Multiple USB connections to multiple drives. It's easy to reach speeds much higher than what fiber can give you this way.
Especially when you consider the ultra fast modern USB standards.
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.
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?
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?
Putting it on your USB is probably not faster than fiber optics, though.
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
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
Should we bring back pneumatic tubes?
Well considering birds are actually spy drones it's not crazy at all. r/birdsarentreal