Well, using the EXP bits, you can uniquely identify 8 different flows, but using an MPLS shim you can uniquely identify 2^23 flows (20 bits for the tag, and the 3 EXP bits). I really don't see that as the same thing.
Um, there is a lot more to packet classification that just IP lookups. You have to uniquely identify the flow. Here is a paper (published in 1999) that gives a O(n) algorithm for doing packet classification, but it doesnt even scale to more that about 6,000 rules.
Who puts the shim on?
Well, you seem to have forgotten that only 1 router in the network has to do the lookup instead of every single router- that saves a lot of lookups.
And MPLS takes care of QoS automatically? Whoa. It does NO SUCH THING
No, I said that MPLS takes care of packet classification automatically, and that is the hardest part of QoS.
MPLS isn't a cure-all, but it does have some very cool benefits.
As the experts in the nwfusion article (http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2001/0806mpls.html) state, MPLS based VPNs are not inherently secure because there's no encryption.
Thats not what the experts said- they said that the default is to not encrypt. There is nothing to stop you from encrypting the whole packet as long as you leave the MPLS label alone.
Sure MPLS can do lots of nice things, but at what cost?
This new layer of complexity amounts to checking the first couple of bits of a packet to see if it has an MPLS shim or not. Thats not a whole lot of complexity or cost.
The source and destination addresses can identify flows most of the time, but its expensive to maintian that rule base and to identify a packet. And if you want more accuracy, you have to add more dimensions to your rule base (src port and dest port for example), and it gets even worse. The best algorithms out there do it in O(n), but the lookup of an MPLS label is done in constant time.
Like several people have already pointed out, you have pretty much missed the point of MPLS. Its pretty easy to throw a MPLS shim header in front of an IP packet, and it makes the job of packet classification a hell of a lot easier (for a taste of what packet classification is like w/o MPLS, or just for some good reading, check out http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/feldmann00tradeoffs.htm l). What you choose to do with that classification really doesnt matter.
I think you discount the QoS benefits too quickly- IMO it wont be long before backbone providers will be charging differently based on different QoS levels ("for $xxx, we can guarantee that 90% of your packets will make it through our network..."). QoS is one of the hottest topics right now, and MPLS takes care of the hardest part automatically.
Earthlink doesnt use any proprietary software (unless you want to count their optional version of IE- I've never used it). Before I had a broadband router, I could make the PPPoE connection just fine from my FreeBSD box, and now it works great from my router. And its hard to beat 1.5Mbit for $50 (for ADSL anyway).
I've had earthlink dsl for about a year now, and up until recently, it was great. 1.5Mb/384Kb for $50/month - qwest (my local phone company) can't compete with those speeds (you can get 640Kb down for $50 I think). But for the last 2 weeks or so, service has been pretty spotty (code red maybe?).
But Earthlink uses Covad as the DSL provider (at least they did for me), so that doesnt solve to problem of Covad going under.
pppoe is SLOW. my 384/150 connection could not stream up an mp3 at 112kb/s
You can't blame that on PPPoE- it only adds like 8 bytes per packet in overhead. According to www.dslreports.com, you are lucky to get 80% of the maximum speed with all of the factors involved (just the IP and TCP packet headers take 13%) http://www.dslreports.com/faq/faq/4.+Using+DSL#473
When I first got DSL, I was kind of annoyed by PPPoE, but ever since I got a broadband router (Ugate 3200P), it is really invisible to me.
Changing IPs. No one wants this crap
Dynamic DNS is usually cheaper than a static IP (that I have seen- ISPs like to group static IP addresses with business service), and the broadband router I got comes with a year free DDNS service anyway.
Waiting to connect...
Even when I had software PPPoE, it took about 1 second to establish a connection.
Even though PPPoE is not ideal, its kind of necessary now (we all can't have static IPs now, can we- until IPv6 anyway), and it really doesnt affect me at all anyway. I could care less about a static IP now that I have dynamic dns, and all of the connection details are automatically handled by the router. The broadband routers on the market today are well worth the money for what you get.
He is not the only one that is anti-fruit juice (or too much fruit juice).
BTW- I've never heard anyone argue that kids today are not getting enough sugar- just think how popular you would be if you took that crusade to the playground...
Wow! You are the first person that I have ever heard that actually likes Lotus Notes. I had to use it for 3 years at my last job, and that was enough (I am happy with Pine at my current job...).
If you want a good laugh, check out the Interface Hall of Shame. The developer comments are especially funny- the developers need to understand that if the user thinks the interface is crappy, it doesn't matter what they think of it- its a crappy interface.
I find that pretty hard to believe.
What about:
-View Source code renders the actual page instead of showing the source code sometimes
-Dont even think about loading a page with any kind of java- that one usually takes a kill -9 to recover
-After it crashes, you have to go delete the dang lock file
-Its taken down X in a ball of flames before (everything quits responding)
-The drop down lists FREAKING SUCK (one of the most annoying things...)
Here is why Konq hasn't gone more mainstream- 50% of the stuff I do in a browser is over SSL- and switching between browsers is just a pain. I finally settled on mozilla (even though netscape 4 seams a ton faster). Mozilla doesn't have a lot of the psycho "how did this ever make it out of testing" bugs that nescape 4 has.
the surviving Chinese pilot said that the US plane "suddenly swerved at a wide angle..."
WHAT? Doesn't anybody else see the blatent contradiction in that statement?
I lived in europe for a while, and it was very interersting to see issues like this from another perspective. While I strongly agree that the US has nothing to apoligize for (if anything, the Chinese should apologize to us...), what do some of you non-US./ers think???
Slashdot Mirror
Well, using the EXP bits, you can uniquely identify 8 different flows, but using an MPLS shim you can uniquely identify 2^23 flows (20 bits for the tag, and the 3 EXP bits). I really don't see that as the same thing.
Um, there is a lot more to packet classification that just IP lookups. You have to uniquely identify the flow. Here is a paper (published in 1999) that gives a O(n) algorithm for doing packet classification, but it doesnt even scale to more that about 6,000 rules.
Who puts the shim on?
Well, you seem to have forgotten that only 1 router in the network has to do the lookup instead of every single router- that saves a lot of lookups.
And MPLS takes care of QoS automatically? Whoa. It does NO SUCH THING
No, I said that MPLS takes care of packet classification automatically, and that is the hardest part of QoS.
MPLS isn't a cure-all, but it does have some very cool benefits.
As the experts in the nwfusion article (http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2001/0806mpls.html) state, MPLS based VPNs are not inherently secure because there's no encryption.
Thats not what the experts said- they said that the default is to not encrypt. There is nothing to stop you from encrypting the whole packet as long as you leave the MPLS label alone.
Sure MPLS can do lots of nice things, but at what cost?
This new layer of complexity amounts to checking the first couple of bits of a packet to see if it has an MPLS shim or not. Thats not a whole lot of complexity or cost.
src/dst addresses identify individual flows uniquely enough
The source and destination addresses can identify flows most of the time, but its expensive to maintian that rule base and to identify a packet. And if you want more accuracy, you have to add more dimensions to your rule base (src port and dest port for example), and it gets even worse. The best algorithms out there do it in O(n), but the lookup of an MPLS label is done in constant time.
Like several people have already pointed out, you have pretty much missed the point of MPLS. Its pretty easy to throw a MPLS shim header in front of an IP packet, and it makes the job of packet classification a hell of a lot easier (for a taste of what packet classification is like w/o MPLS, or just for some good reading, check out http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/feldmann00tradeoffs.htm l). What you choose to do with that classification really doesnt matter.
I think you discount the QoS benefits too quickly- IMO it wont be long before backbone providers will be charging differently based on different QoS levels ("for $xxx, we can guarantee that 90% of your packets will make it through our network..."). QoS is one of the hottest topics right now, and MPLS takes care of the hardest part automatically.
Care to explain?
Earthlink doesnt use any proprietary software (unless you want to count their optional version of IE- I've never used it). Before I had a broadband router, I could make the PPPoE connection just fine from my FreeBSD box, and now it works great from my router. And its hard to beat 1.5Mbit for $50 (for ADSL anyway).
Earthlink isn't even close to AOL...
I've had earthlink dsl for about a year now, and up until recently, it was great. 1.5Mb/384Kb for $50/month - qwest (my local phone company) can't compete with those speeds (you can get 640Kb down for $50 I think). But for the last 2 weeks or so, service has been pretty spotty (code red maybe?).
But Earthlink uses Covad as the DSL provider (at least they did for me), so that doesnt solve to problem of Covad going under.
Oops- meant to say that dynamic addresses are not ideal (since that seams to be one of the biggest complaints here about PPPoE).
pppoe is SLOW. my 384/150 connection could not stream up an mp3 at 112kb/s
3
You can't blame that on PPPoE- it only adds like 8 bytes per packet in overhead. According to www.dslreports.com, you are lucky to get 80% of the maximum speed with all of the factors involved (just the IP and TCP packet headers take 13%)
http://www.dslreports.com/faq/faq/4.+Using+DSL#47
When I first got DSL, I was kind of annoyed by PPPoE, but ever since I got a broadband router (Ugate 3200P), it is really invisible to me.
Changing IPs. No one wants this crap
Dynamic DNS is usually cheaper than a static IP (that I have seen- ISPs like to group static IP addresses with business service), and the broadband router I got comes with a year free DDNS service anyway.
Waiting to connect...
Even when I had software PPPoE, it took about 1 second to establish a connection.
Even though PPPoE is not ideal, its kind of necessary now (we all can't have static IPs now, can we- until IPv6 anyway), and it really doesnt affect me at all anyway. I could care less about a static IP now that I have dynamic dns, and all of the connection details are automatically handled by the router. The broadband routers on the market today are well worth the money for what you get.
Totally. I have a fiber connection to my house and it sucks.
Check out http://my.webmd.com/content/article/1728.79157
He is not the only one that is anti-fruit juice (or too much fruit juice).
BTW- I've never heard anyone argue that kids today are not getting enough sugar- just think how popular you would be if you took that crusade to the playground...
So, what you are saying is that child rearing is NP-Complete?
I'm such a nerd...
Check out http://www.denverbroncos.com/lockerroom/bios/crock ett_ray.php3
Ray Crockett on the Denver Broncos recieved a degree in... Computer Science! I guess they all aren't dumb jocks...
Wow! You are the first person that I have ever heard that actually likes Lotus Notes. I had to use it for 3 years at my last job, and that was enough (I am happy with Pine at my current job...).
If you want a good laugh, check out the Interface Hall of Shame. The developer comments are especially funny- the developers need to understand that if the user thinks the interface is crappy, it doesn't matter what they think of it- its a crappy interface.
I guess its kind of too late for this response, but I've never got Konq ssl to work through a proxy. I actually haven't tried without a proxy.
I find that pretty hard to believe.
What about:
-View Source code renders the actual page instead of showing the source code sometimes
-Dont even think about loading a page with any kind of java- that one usually takes a kill -9 to recover
-After it crashes, you have to go delete the dang lock file
-Its taken down X in a ball of flames before (everything quits responding)
-The drop down lists FREAKING SUCK (one of the most annoying things...)
You get the idea. I am much happier with mozilla.
Here is why Konq hasn't gone more mainstream- 50% of the stuff I do in a browser is over SSL- and switching between browsers is just a pain. I finally settled on mozilla (even though netscape 4 seams a ton faster). Mozilla doesn't have a lot of the psycho "how did this ever make it out of testing" bugs that nescape 4 has.
the surviving Chinese pilot said that the US plane "suddenly swerved at a wide angle..."
./ers think???
WHAT? Doesn't anybody else see the blatent contradiction in that statement?
I lived in europe for a while, and it was very interersting to see issues like this from another perspective. While I strongly agree that the US has nothing to apoligize for (if anything, the Chinese should apologize to us...), what do some of you non-US
and unfortunately their java support is behind
Aint that the truth. I love FreeBSD and I use it almost exclusively, but they really need to finish up that Java 2 port...