Comments

• mesamunefire@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Ive had this thought for a while.

  If humans ever go to other planets, its going to be VERY hard to keep software up to date without some serous thought and relay stations. The speed of light is a hard restriction.

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  • frongt@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Local mirrors and caching proxies.

    I’ve worked in an environment like this. We had a local server for Windows and Mac updates. Direct updates were blocked. It’s a solved problem, you just need developers to participate.

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    • mesamunefire@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Interesting. The article seems to claim otherwise? How would Paul have fixed the issues he was coming across? If you had to, say, do Windows/Mac updates in the current architecture, how would that work? I thought those were hard set by MS/Apple?

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  • shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    This is what IPFS is for. Instead of linking to a location that would be way far away off planet, it links to the content which could very well be cached on planet or on a relay station closer. Sure, one person has to pull it down from the incredibly far away place, but once it’s pulled down at least one time, everybody else pulls it from the more local version that that person has. However, though, timeouts will need to be increased. Maybe not to some insanely stupid amount, but they will need to be increased somewhat.

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  • thatonecoder@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    This is one of the reasons why I preach against Electron apps and the “storage is cheap” argument. Additionally, it may also be really expensive for people in 3rd world countries to buy storage.

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  • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Maybe Microsoft will let us have local accounts again?

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    • ArsonButCute@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Microsoft will absolutely not be making it on the interplanetary scene.

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  • Rentlar@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Instead of sneaker-net it will be rocket-net… and at a certain point you need an on-prem on-planet support team to just figure things out.

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• undefined@lemmy.hogru.ch ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  This very much bothers me as a web developer. I go hard on Conditinal GET Request support and compression as well as using http/2+. I’m tired of using websites (outside of work) that need to load a fuckton of assets (even after I block 99% of advertising and tracking domains).

  macOS and iOS actually allow updates to be cached locally on the network, and if I remember correctly Windows has some sort of peer-to-peer mechanism for updates too (I can’t remember if that works over the LAN though; I don’t use Windows).

  The part I struggle with is caching HTTP. It used to be easy pre-HTTPS but now it’s practically impossible. I do think other types of apps do a poor job of caching things though too.

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  • frongt@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Yes, Windows peer to peer update downloads work over LAN. (In theory, I’ve never verified it.)

    HTTP caching still works fine, if your proxy performs SSL termination and reencryption. In an enterprise environment that’s fine, for individuals it’s a non-starter. In this case, you’d want to have a local CDN mirror.

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    • undefined@lemmy.hogru.ch ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I couldn’t get SSL bumping in Squid on Alpine Linux about a year ago but I’m willing to give it another shot.

      My home router is also a mini PC on Alpine Linux. I do transparent caching of plain HTTP (it’s minimal but it works) but with others using the router I do feel uneasy about SSL bumping, not to mention some apps (banks) are a lot more strict about it.

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• tal@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Two major applications I’ve used that don’t deal well with slow cell links:

  • Lemmyverse.net runs an index of all Threadiverse instances and all communities on all instances, and presently is an irreplaceable resource for a user on here who wants to search for a given community. It loads an enormous amount of data for the communities page, and has some sort of short timeout. Whatever it’s pulling down internally — I didn’t look — either isn’t cached or is a single file, so reloading the page restarts from the start. The net result is that it won’t work over a slow connection.

  • This may have been fixed, but git had a serious period of time where it would smash into timeouts and not work on slow links, at least to github. This made it impossible to clone larger repositories; I remember failing trying to clone the Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead repository, where one couldn’t even manage a shallow clone. This was greatly-exacerbated by the fact that git does not presently have the ability to resume downloads if a download is interrupted. I’ve generally wound up working around this by git cloning to a machine on a fast connection, then using rsync to pull a repository over to the machine on a slow link, which, frankly, is a little embarrassing when one considers that git really is the premier distributed VCS tool out there in 2025.

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  • mesamunefire@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I remember there is some timeout flags you can do on curl that you can use in conjunction with git...but its been nearly a decade since Ive done anything of the sort. Modern day GitHub is fast-ish...but yeah bigger stuff has some big git issues.

    Good points! Didn't know about Lemmyverse.net!

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    • rimu@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      As a PieFed user, soon you don't need to - piefed instances will automatically subscribe to every community in newcommunities@lemmy.world so the local communities-finder will always have everything you ever need.

      Coming in v1.2.

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  • tal@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    A bit of banging away later — I haven’t touched Linux traffic shaping in some years — I’ve got a quick-and-dirty script to set a machine up to temporarily simulate a slow inbound interface for testing.

    :::spoiler slow.sh test script

    # !/bin/bash
    # Linux traffic-shaping occurs on the outbound traffic.  This script
    # sets up a virtual interface and places inbound traffic on that virtual
    # interface so that it may be rate-limited to simulate a network with a slow inbound connection.
    # Removes induced slow-down prior to exiting.
    
    # Physical interface to slow; set as appropriate
    oif="wlp2s0"
    
    modprobe ifb numifbs=1
    ip link set dev ifb0 up
    tc qdisc add dev $oif handle ffff: ingress
    tc filter add dev $oif parent ffff: protocol ip u32 match u32 0 0 action mirred egress redirect dev ifb0
    
    tc qdisc add dev ifb0 root handle 1: htb default 10
    tc class add dev ifb0 parent 1: classid 1:1 htb rate 1mbit
    tc class add dev ifb0 parent 1:1 classid 1:10 htb rate 1mbit
    
    echo "Rate-limiting active.  Hit Control-D to exit."
    cat
    
    # shut down rate-limiting
    tc qdisc delete dev $oif ingress
    tc qdisc delete dev ifb0 root
    ip link  set dev ifb0 down
    rmmod ifb
    

    :::

    I’m going to see whether I can still reproduce that git failure for Cataclysm on git 2.47.2, which is what’s in Debian trixie. As I recall, it got a fair bit of the way into the download before bailing out. Including here since I think that the article makes a good point that there probably should be more slow-network testing, and maybe someone else wants to test something themselves on a slow network.

    Probably be better to have something a little fancier to only slow traffic for one particular application — maybe create a “slow Podman container and match on traffic going to that?” — but this is good enough for a quick-and-dirty test.

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    • mesamunefire@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Nice! Scientific data!

      Also looks like its still an issue with GH: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/135808 in slower countries. so yeah nvm its still a huge issue even today.

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• fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  First design things to work fully offline. Full airgap between the system and the rest of the world. Then introduce features to update that airgapped system from one way data transfers (like sneakernetting a hard drive/USB/disk/tape). Then introduce additional features to get that data from a network but cached local. Then introduce networked features, and only if connecting to another independent system is absolutely needed.

  Basically stick what has worked in tech and avoid developing SaaS. At least if you are making something for users and not shareholders.

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• DontNoodles@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  While this is indeed a noble cause, i wonder if internet being slow in Antarctica is real. A large number of data recieving stations for polar satellites are stationed in Antarctica and they send data to other continents through high speed fiber lines which are also used for internet.

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  • frongt@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It is quite real. The satellite links are like 10 Mbps. You go far enough south, and you cant even hit the satellite because it’s over the horizon. There aren’t any high-speed polar satellites. Companies don’t send their satellites that far south because there are too few customers to justify the cost.

    That’s changing with starlink, though, since those ones are in a polar orbit.

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    • CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      10 Mbps is like average Scotland internet unless you’re in a major city.

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    • DontNoodles@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      My point is that Antarctica is well connected by fiber. Am I mistaken?

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• shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Meshtastic LongFast is a blazing 1.09kbps and even ShortFast is ~10kbps. Wifi 802.11ah halo can do 4mhz and 16mbps max.

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• Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Have they tried sending their packets using pigeons?

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  • owenfromcanada@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
    – Andrew S. Tanenbaum

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  • mesamunefire@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    heh! Thats such a funny/cool protocol.

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