Re: Internet without entrenched factions?
Dave Crocker via Internet-history <[email protected]> Sat, 16 May 2026 00:44:09 +0000 (UTC)
| Newsgroups | gmane.culture.internet.history |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
On 5/15/2026 1:19 PM, Noel Chiappa via Internet-history wrote: > > From: Brian E Carpenter > > Well, there's one area that stills needs to be fixed ... We don't know > > how to support site multihoming in a competitive environment for tens > > of millions of small and medium enterprises. > > ... > > Basically, TANSTAAFL. Site multi-homing gives benefits; benefits usually > aren't free; somebody has to pay. Since I found myself with an operational activity from my home and my ISP went out for some day and my cell-phone fallback was not up to the task, I bought an OTC router that permits multi-homing and got an account with a second ISP. (And per my insight of some decades ago, I have both be active, rather than have the second be on hot standby and hopefully start performing when it is needed.) The multi-homed router does NAT, so my internal hosts don't see any functional -- or even addressing -- difference depending on which ISP is used for a connection. This does provide simple, cheap, useful operational redundancy. What it does not do is maintain a connection across an ISP failure. Back when this topic was active 25-30 years ago, I suggested putting a shim between the app and TCP, providing an appearance of a TCP connection to the app, but mapping it down to multiple, alternative connections over different ISPs. This could then be robust and maintain a TCP connection across ISP failures. When I was researching this, I discovered that the design of TLS is actually of an extensible session layer, which probably would make possible to do a design that could be deployed as just an upgrade to the TLS software. Never got any interest in the approach. And from what I recall, neither did any other approach. This suggests that the Internet is simply much too reliable to motivate people for an additional robustness layer... d/ -- Dave Crocker [email protected] bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social mast: @[email protected] +1.408.329.0791 Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter Northern California Coastal Region Information & Planning Coordinator American Red Cross [email protected] -- Internet-history mailing list [email protected] https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history - Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history