Agreed, still not perfect by any means.

One minor Ethernet MTU thing I would change with a time machine is to have the network header portion of the MTU be more like 802.11. I.e. instead of sized exactly to the headers of the day it intentionally was larger to allow variation over time. It wouldn't really do anything for most of the MTU concerns discussed here or for clients but I think it would have been helpful for the evolution of wired protocols.

Happy eyeballs! Yes, I loved that one! I was always a huge IPv6 nerd as well, though I didn't get started until shortly after that. The "nats are good" video isn't ringing any bells but if you have a link I'd definitely give it a watch as it sounds right up my humour alley.

Unfortunately all of that Cisco affiliation means we are forever blood enemies and can never speak again... ;). I kid, I came up through the Nortel heritage originally so I'm bound by contract to make such statements.

I've heard great things about the Fast Data Project, I'll definitely have to look into it some before the Oblivion remake comes out :). Maybe after this current project at work I'll finally get to mess with software based dataplanes properly.

It was great running into you here, I hope to catch you around more now that I know to look!

> more like 802.11

L2 is “relatively simple” in a sense that it’s usually under the same administrative control; unlike with L3. And even then, if you have a look at all the complexity between the maintaining the interop in the wireless space… it’s amazing it works as well as it does, with so much functionality being conditional.

> "nats are good" video isn't ringing any bells

https://youtu.be/v26BAlfWBm8?feature=shared - it was a bit of a meme back at the time in making the “X fanboy” videos.

> I came up through the Nortel heritage originally

My networking cradle is Netware 4.1, and in those times it was a zoo of protocols anyway. I really liked conceptually the elegance of Nortel management being SNMP-first. Makes me smile hearing all these “API-first!” claims today.

> It was great running into you here

Indeed, nice to meet you too ! :-)

I do a fair bit of lurking. yesterday was a bit of an anomaly since the whole “truncation as a means to do PMTUD” was a subject of my idle ponder for more than a decade, so it struck the chord :-)