[jaimex2]

Finding a use case for this would be tricky...

Quic already does this end to end.

The only use case I can think of might be gaming. If you had a HTTP/Websockets based game you wanted to cut latency down on you could have the FF proxy hosted near the game server.

[umvi]

> Finding a use case for this would be tricky...

I can tell you a real life use case that already exists because I built this exact thing already (though a closed-source version): satellite internet terminals.

With satellite internet, uplink (upload) is generally more complicated than downlink (download). This is because a terminal can just passively listen for packets intended for him, but with uplink you have to make sure you only transmit in your designated time slot.

Because uplink is more complicated than downlink, more often than not uplink will get in a degraded or broken state, while downlink is still operational.

Now say I get a call from a customer service rep saying a customer's terminal is stuck in a degraded state. How can I recover it? TCP (and therefore HTTP) is a no-go because it requires uplink to be fully functional. So I can't visit the terminal's embedded webserver or issue commands to the HTTP API.

However, using a udp to tcp proxy like this, I can issue commands to the terminal's HTTP API "blindly" which it will then execute to (hopefully) recover itself. This can also be done with other "one-way" protocols like SNMP.

[withinboredom]

Wow. I was literally about to reply with the same exact thing (built my own as well)! No value in this comment other than to validate your comment.

[londons_explore]

I feel like the real solution is your terminal should ping every hour, and if a ping test fails it should auto-reset itself and file a bug for the developers with whatever state information is needed for them to fix the bug.

[umvi]

Unfortunately satellite internet systems are way more complicated than you probably think. It can be very hard to tell why a terminal is experiencing issues. Sometimes it's because of a nearby cell phone tower and you have to adjust some terminal configurations to shift frequencies slightly. Maybe there's just a lots of bad weather in that particular part of the country and rain fade is degrading the signal and the terminal isn't transmitting at max power like it should. Maybe your neighbor has a police radar detector in his car interfering with the signal. Maybe a horse has bumped the dish and it's slightly mispointed at the satellite now. Maybe it's an issue on the gateway side. (all true stories).

Unless it's a mass issue across a whole beam, it usually requires some investigation to figure out why an individual terminal state is degraded. And sometimes (more than I'm comfortable with) during the course of your investigation you make the terminal state even worse (because you tweaked some config parameter the wrong way). You can always tell when you done messed up because suddenly you get disconnected from your ssh session or you can no longer reach the embedded web server from your browser. In those cases sometimes the only way to recover is to precisely undo what you did, and an auto-ping-reset will not fix it (unless the system keeps track of most recent config changes or something). Your options are: use udp/tcp proxy or snmp to attempt to undo the config parameter you foobared or send out a technician and fix it on site...

I'm not saying our system is perfect. Surely we could improve fault detection and recovery. I'm just saying one-way communication protocols are real nice to have sometimes because of these scenarios.

[nineteen999]

We run a bunch of remote paging basestations that utilize satellite, however, they are also backed up with 4G routers which are used instead if the satellite link fails for any reason (rain fade, nuclear missile attack on the satellite hub/network etc). I guess TV over 4G would use a lot more bandwidth and potentially be very expensive.

[747fulloftapes]

Or it could be a few nuts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZkAP-CQlhA

( yes, I know that's a terrestrial, microwave relay dish and not a satellite antenna, but it could happen.)

[kstenerud]

Wouldn't such a system be a big security hole?

[blackflame7000]

No because you can still use cryptographic signatures to ensure the packets are valid before acting on them.

[vvanders]

You can already do this with WebRTC, you just need and implementation that won't fall back to TCP if the UDP negotiation fails.

[zemo]

have you ever actually done this?

I don't mean to sound smug, but I'm the author of the Jackbox Games multiplayer servers, I regularly handle hundreds of thousands of simultaneous websocket connections from players' phones. I can't for the life of me find a server implementation of webrtc data channels that I would actually put into production. I've seen a few blog posts with toy examples, but nothing that is ready for production. It sounds nice in theory, but try actually finding a production-ready server implementation of WebRTC data channels. I would LOVE to find a documented example of doing client-server communication with WebRTC data channels (a Go implementation on the server specifically). I've found no such thing. Every few months I search and don't find such a thing, and I don't need the extra few ms of latency improvement badly enough that it would be worth the engineering time to author it myself. If you know of one that's actually ready for primetime, I'd love to hear about it.

edit: after writing this comment, I did some snooping around since I haven't snooped around on this topic in a few months, this looks promising, unclear how widely used people are using it for production work: https://github.com/pion/webrtc

[vvanders]

Had to write the SDP handshake and re-build a subset of SCTP from scratch since the only SCTP implementation uses a global listener which doesn't play nice for a clean server implementation(it was also a royal pain to compile in a way that played nice with Rust).

I got it working far enough to handle the WebRTC handshake over SCTP and get some basic data flowing. It's still in pretty rough shape and ran out of time to document it to any degree where someone else could take it and run with it.

If there's enough interest I might pick it up again but right now I've got other priorities going on.

[bentcorner]

Just wanted to comment and say thank you for your work :). The Jackbox games work flawlessly and even when they get into a weird state a refresh usually sorts things out. Thanks for covering whatever weird corner cases you had to cover to get it to work so consistently.

I'm actually a little surprised the Jackbox games aren't monetized differently. They cost so little up front and that CPU time can't be free.

Just today I set up my wife's laptop with Drawful 2 and Jackbox 6 so she can play with her coworkers tomorrow. Thanks!

[geocar]

> have you ever actually done this?

I have, but I didn't use go. I wrote a webrtc server in C, and probably handled something north of a trillion event points per month this way (receiving telemetry from interactive digital advertisements).

My goal wasn't latency but capacity: I can handle maybe 100kqps in HTTP on the same kit that could handle something like 600kqps+ messages with this (Never did proper limit testing here, since I knew my supplier was limited on the network links). It took about three weeks to get operational to a point it could be added to production, which was worth it to me.

[zemo]

when you say http do you mean a roundtrip per data point? curious if you went from 1 http request per data point to webrtc or from something more like 1 websocket message per data point to webrtc.

[geocar]

The former. Events might come minutes apart, and session establishment costs peanuts compared to having a TCP port open for minutes.

[J_tt]

One thing I've always been curious about with JackBox is if it does anything when everyone's on the same LAN?

[zemo]

not sure what you have in mind, but no not currently

[blackflame7000]

What about household vs household games? Bring a new meaning to keeping up with the Jones’s :)

[penagwin]

Wait webrtc uses udp? Is this new? I thought there was no way to send udp packets through client side Javascript?

[vvanders]

Yup, it's been a while since I read the spec but I believe it leaves the transport up to what can be negotiated for maximum compatibility.

If you handle the SDP and SCTP handshake you can force it to only use UDP via SCTP. Chrome and FF both support it today.

[mr_luc]

Yeah with WebRTC data channels can be UDP!

It's just -- and this may be mildly out of date -- EXTREMELY hard to find a server-side setup that will let you do all of what the browsers now support with WebRTC.

My recollection from the last time I skipped across this topic was: there are 1 or 2 heavyweight open source projects that mostly focus on the video aspects but also supported data channel stuff, and then one lightweight C and one lightweight Go project that supported everything, and you were mostly out of luck otherwise.

I remember the last time I checked, a year ago or so, pieces of what's required being worked on in recent OTP releases in BEAM-land. Hmmm ... time to check again.

[fulafel]

There is no raw udp or tcp access from browser js, just higher lwvel protocols that are implemented over tcp or udp.

[mypalmike]

Just strip out TCP ICE candidates from the SDP and it won't use TCP.