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Networking & Internet

The most popular blog posts about networking & internet on Hacker News. 255 posts.

2021
212

No U PNP

Previously on Deep Space Nine, we discussed (read: I complained about) the short life and quick death of DLNA. On the way, I mentioned DLNA's dependence on UPnP as an underlying autoconfiguration protocol. Let's talk a bit more about UPnP, because it's 1) an interesting protocol, 2) widely misunderstood, and 3)…

215

PipeWire and fixing the Linux Video Capture stack

PipeWire has already made great strides forward in terms of improving the audio handling situation on Linux, but one of the original goals was to also bring along the video side of the house. In fact in the first few releases of Fedora Workstation where we shipped PipeWire we solely enabled it as a tool...

217

Was the NE2000 really that bad?

Over the last few months I have been on and off digging into the history of early PC networking products, especially Ethernet-based ones. In that context, it is impossible to miss the classic NE2000 adapter with all its offshoots and clones. Especially in the Linux community, the NE2000 seems to have had rather bad…

219

The utilization of 44/8: the reason I mapped IPv4 and IPv6

In the early days, when the Internet was just beginning, back in 1981, radio amateurs were allocated, by what is now known as IANA , an IPv4 block for usage and experimentation by all members of this hobby, internationally. This block was 44.0.0.0/8, which is a huge amount of address space by today’s standards, but…

224

Re-thinking electronic mail

There are many problems with the existing Internet email system, such as spam, scam, surveillance, insecurity, centralization, and complexity. The problems are starting to outweigh the benefits of the system. Fixing the problems by evolving the current system seems overwhelmingly difficult. This essay examines some…

229

Faster Linux 2.5G Networking with Realtek RTL8125B

Since the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 was introduced last year, I've been testing a variety of PCI Express NICs with it. One of the main types of NIC I'm interested in is cheap 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet adapters. 2.5 Gigabits is about the highest reasonable bandwidth you can get through the PCI Express Gen 2.0 x1 lane on…

232

Splitting the Ping

Ping is one of the fundamental pillars of networking. It’s simple, universally supported, and is normally one of the few things that is shipped with all network stacks.

239

Helping to secure internet routing

The internet works reliably, in large part, on the basis of a key technology called Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). BGP is a means by which all junction points on the internet (routers) communicate with each other to dynamically establish the correct (and correctly weighted) paths that network packets should follow to…

240

Go HTTPS Servers with TLS

This post is a basic introduction to running HTTPS servers and clients in Go using TLS. It assumes some familiarity with public-key crypto. Feel free to check out my earlier posts about RSA and the Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange ; TLS uses the elliptic-curve version of Diffie-Hellman. I won't be covering how the protocol…