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The Twelve Networking Truths (1996) (ietf.org)
82 points by elorm on Feb 16, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 17 comments



It's funny to see something like this in a professional body now. Today, this kind of thing is PR'ed, HR'ed, and managed out. Like jokes and swear words and things in code comments.

You can understand why, light-hearted fun is not necessary so its risk/reward is strictly negative. Still makes me a bit nostalgic for a time in computing that I never experienced, like the old usenet group archives (I was alive and using computers in some capacity at that time, just not working in the industry).


> light-hearted fun is not necessary

It might not be necessary, but I think it’s sorely needed

Being serious all the time is unhealthy


The best programs are (were) the ones the programmers had fun writing them.


Wow, a blast from the past! I first stumbled on these some time in the early 2000s.

During my stint in Big Tech, I would often times reflect how much of what I was seeing was an instance of:

> With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine.


See: F-4 Phantom


> Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick any two (you can't have all three).

Far too many people believe that if you have something that's not two of these that the third follows, specifically if you have Not-Fast and Not-Cheap it follows it must therefore be Good. It's quite possible to be Bad, Slow, Expensive. Indeed it's often likely to be that.

There's also a belief that you can't have three of

# Good enough, Fast enough, Cheap enough: Pick any two (you can't have all three).

With more time and more money you can usually make things better, but you can also make things worse. The question in business is does it meet the need. Does doubling the budget also double the business value.

Fundamentally I dislike this absolute, and indeed the next claim

> It is more complicated than you think.

Is bang on


Related: Fallacies of distributed computing <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_compu...>


The first rule of network transparency is: the network is not transparent.



A classic and applicable to more than networking alone..


Still applicable today, equally so to broader layers of (cloud) infrastructure.


  You cannot act on information you do not have.
Applies to both people debugging things, and networked systems answering requests.


This has been in my sig for ever, in all public profiles. The "truths" apply for way more than just networking.


Yeah, it was shivering to see things we discuss over and over is being discussed over and over since 1996, at least.

I may start to add this to my e-mail signature, too.


Wonder if there’s a good RFC in store for us this April 1st


(1996)


See rule 11.




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