Noq: n0's new QUIC implementation in Rust (opens in new tab)

Great interaction. Very refreshing after some of the past problems I've encountered with maintainers treating forks as hostile or "stealing our work".

The message also exposes a reality of how hard it can be to upstream internal changes: They admit they don't have the time to go back and re-submit all of their work as tiny incremental patches that could be reviewed and approved upstream. They estimate it would be on the order of 100 PRs necessary to break it up and get it reviewed. That's a very large time investment for a company that needs to keep moving forward.

Hopefully they stay close in the rest of the implementation details of the project they forked from. After a fork becomes battle-tested enough it might be reasonable to start merging things in larger chunks rather than treating them as incremental development again.

I very much agree, a nice contrast to so much open source drama

The zero-config part is where it gets tricky in practice. I spent a while getting mDNS-based discovery working across different home networks and it's a mess. Half the consumer routers silently drop multicast between subnets, some just rate-limit it into uselessness. You end up layering fallback after fallback (broadcast, then direct probe, then relay) and writing heuristics to pick which path actually works. Having multipath baked into QUIC so the transport just tries all paths and converges on the best one would've saved me a lot of that.

You may be interested in my list here: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

In particular I believe OpenZiti has a similar focus on embedding the tunnel in the apps.

Good to know. I usually use magic wormhole, which works great, but it does install a lot of python modules to achieve it. I'm always a little reluctant to install that on our production Windows SQL servers, and I rarely touch them, so usually when I do I just do a "netcat" equivalent via either a powershell snippet or https://github.com/linsomniac/toothpyk or I just "wget" it on the Windows side. For SQL Server ISOs, the Windows built in wget is terribly slow though.

Thanks for the sendme pointer.

Same here. They've built an amazing toolkit that's such a joy to build with. Feels like game changer to have p2p that both reliable, fast, and fun.

noq doesn't implement any relaying logic itself. From the perspective of noq, iroh relays are another IP subnet that it's sending packets to and receives packets from, so just another path.

> Or is the relayed QUIC wrapped in different protocol?

Yes, that's what's happening.

On the iroh/iroh-relay side, we implement this relaying using WebSockets. The datagrams are wrapped with a header saying which EndpointId (ed25519 public key) we want the packet to be relayed to. Because of a handshake between iroh clients and iroh relays, the relay knows and has authenticated the source EndpointId of datagrams it relays.

So yeah, we're tunneling QUIC datagrams through HTTPS over TCP (we encrypt twice). The relay really is just a fallback and for coordination. We specifically made these choices for maximum ubiquity for the fallback (not affected by UDP blocking, looks like "normal" traffic).

you might want to take a look at those, they have been mentioned on their discord: - https://github.com/rustonbsd/iroh-lan - https://github.com/lucascherzer/iron

Many QUIC features get implemented while in draft stage as people iterate on the RFC's design (e.g., ACK Frequency[0] is currently on draft version 14 and I implemented support for it three years ago in quinn).

[0]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-quic-ack-fr...

It’s common enough for groups to not consider the spec done until there is a decent bit of implementation experience (both because actual implementers tend to find interesting bugs in specs, and because many things are hard to measure without any implementation).

It’s pretty common for IETF drafts to be substantially complete well before they are finalized as RFCs. For example, supporting ML-KEM in TLS is still a draft, but there are already multiple large scale deployments of it since the technical aspects were nailed down a while ago

> I guess it's common to have the implementation foreshadowing the RFC

"Rough consensus and running code" is the IETF's unofficial motto. Working Group Drafts are generally accompanied by implementations.

It's been a draft for a long while, and was only recently approved

The TLS authentication story is fully configurable. This hasn't changed compared to Quinn. We use noq in iroh, and in iroh we use raw public keys (RFC7250). When you use iroh, you don't need to set up DNS or TLS certificates, you just generate a key, share the public key and others can connect to you. (Of course the trouble is sharing the public key securely.)

It turns out that "Have the defaults arranged so that they suit a handful of crazy people but inconvenience literally everybody else" isn't popular. In fact preferring a tiny minority preference is sort of inherently unpopular, that's basically its defining feature as a policy.

Now, see. that's what I said as well. But the rest of the team was tired of me trying to name the hosted iroh "n0des", which I'm now ready to admit was a stretch. And so now here we are spelling n0q as noq. c'est la vie.

There were experiments :) https://github.com/dignifiedquire/nquinn

The cool thing about noq (and Quinn, where we inherited this from), is that you can implement your own "Session" trait. So that can be either TLS or nQUIC.