I just had a thought while reading over the KLIPS code and creating beautiful inkscape diagrams from it ([see previous post]{20060824145428})…

Wouldn’t it be great if we had IPcomp that worked for all connections? Your cpu is always faster then the internet connection – or at least it has been my case for the last decade and a bit.

So my idea was… why not have IPcomp on all the time. Assume the other host you want to talk to has IPcomp enabled for TCP and UDP. On the first packet we send, if they don’t understand it, they will hopefully send back an ICMP error and then we retransmit the packet uncompressed. For TCP that would be pretty trival, because TCP already retransmits. For UDP we would have to remember the IPs that we tried and have a way to hold the packets before the verdict is known.