Post
Topic
Board Archival
Re: How (and why) to use the Relay Network
by
Matt Corallo
on 07/07/2016, 23:01:57 UTC
I block all UDP and run no UDP services coz it's been the majority cause of DDoS that occurred since I started the pool ...
... since there is no 'network security' applied to UDP on the internet.
If you're talking about running your own FIBRE-based network: No need to enable incoming UDP on pool servers to run FIBRE. TCP/Compact Block relay to servers only a few ms away is plenty fast, so you could just as easily put a relay network server on a separate server (and probably should, given that its still beta and based on Bitcoin Core master just before segwit was merged).

If you're talking about connecting to someone else's: I never really envisioned it as running over UDP between miners and the first-hop server. While this is definitely an option (and FIBRE has an "untrusted" mode for this), there is little advantage to spending 10ms calculating FEC data over just eating the 10ms RTT for a dropped packet or two if the servers are nearby. FIBRE is great for long-haul links, but Compact Blocks work just as well if you're talking about short-hops.

General note: FIBRE's UDP does have a shared-key HMAC in each packet, so that packets are easily and trivially authenticated.