Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

krebsonsecurity.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 176 posts

Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

#81

Post by unethical_ban »

throw0101a wrote: post #78
fredophile wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The internet routes around failure" hasn't been true for a long time. It refers to the original topography which has been replaced with a hub and spoke model. Remove a few hubs and you have disabled a large portion of the internet.

> Remove a few hubs and you have disabled a large portion of the internet. "A few hubs"? Just Hurricane Electric has presence in many, many IXPs, and they're not even the largest transit provider: * https://bgp.he.net/AS6939#_ix AT&T, the largest transit provider, has a ridiculous number of peers: * https://bgp.he.net/AS7018#_peers And there are several different major global providers: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wik…

I didn't RTFM but I could see the argument that the SPOFs of the Internet are AWS, Cloudflare and Google, not the cables and routers in an IXP.

Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

#82

Post by lotsofpulp »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #59
lotsofpulp wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coaxial cable connections in the US have such meager upload bandwidth that cable ISPs do not even bother advertising or specifying a minimum upload bandwidth.

Yeah, but I’ve been able to stream music from my desktop to my phone while driving and run a web server with reasonable performance on one.

I consider multiple HD video streams to be reasonable performance. I have a family of 4 to 6 which at any point in time may be FaceTiming, video calling for work, video gaming, backing up to iCloud, streaming HD video from home NAS, and 5+ security cameras uploading.

Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

#83

Post by throw0101a »

unethical_ban wrote: post #81
throw0101a wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Remove a few hubs and you have disabled a large portion of the internet. "A few hubs"? Just Hurricane Electric has presence in many, many IXPs, and they're not even the largest transit provider: * https://bgp.he.net/AS6939#_ix AT&T, the largest transit provider, has a ridiculous number of peers: * https://bgp.he.net/AS7018#_peers And there are several different major global providers: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wik…

I didn't RTFM but I could see the argument that the SPOFs of the Internet are AWS, Cloudflare and Google, not the cables and routers in an IXP.

The article is about BGP and Internet Routing Registry (IRR): routing.

Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

#84

Post by throw0101a »

toast0 wrote: post #33
ip26 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by “remove a few hubs” you mean level a few major colo’s then ok, but as far as I can tell there is not any single strand of glass or single switch or single server that can take everything down with it.

The DNS root is pretty well distributed. There's 13 different IPs run by several different organizations, and AFAIK they're all running anycast these days. And anyway, the root zone is tiny, changes infrequently and could really be AXFRed a couple times a month and you wouldn't miss much. The larger tlds aren't quite as diversely hosted and certainly aren't amenable to long term caching, but it should take a major f…

> As of 11/26/2021 10:53 p.m., the root server system consists of 1477 instances operated by the 12 independent root server operators.

* https://root-servers.org

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server

Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

#85

Post by peoplefromibiza »

999900000999 wrote: post #77
WJW wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machine shops are also private goods and their owners have a lot of incentive to keep them working, so I don't think this example is very accurate. In any case the chance of breaking anything with a partially stripped screwdriver is pretty minimal.

If you don't know what you're doing you can strip a screw. Getting it out won't be fun.

if you're at home, with no other tools, it could be painful.

but in a shop unless you can't take it out using other means (pliers for example or a nut split remover), you can simply weld a bolt on the screw's head and use a wrench to unscrew it.

or drill a hole through it after removing the head and use another screw to take out the moncone from the other side.

Bad screws are more common than bad screwdrivers and even a brand new screwdriver could lead to the same result.

as the original post said "If it breaks all the time, everybody is highly experienced at patching together new workarounds"

Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

#86

Post by lotsofpulp »

doubled112 wrote: post #71
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but I’ve been able to stream music from my desktop to my phone while driving and run a web server with reasonable performance on one.

It's more than adequate for personal use. I've also been serving myself and a few friends for years. Download being 300Mpbs but upload 20Mbps IS kind of irritating though. When did 100Mbps become popular for home LANs even?

Covid lockdowns helped with video calls, but ever since FaceTime came out, lack of upload became way more noticeable

Also, smartphone proliferation made streaming from home NAS very convenient, as well as home security cameras and smart home features.

I disagree that current upload capacities are adequate. With 1Gbps+ upload connections standard, we might actually see privacy forward solutions that do not require us to depend on cloud services.

Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

#87

Post by throwaway984393 »

krisrm wrote: post #35

I'm a bit shocked that MAIL-FROM auth was ever accepted, let alone until 2012. Even the other auth methods via email seem somewhat dangerous, though I sincerely hope these registries follow extremely strict policies for key management.

That's how validation of TLS certificates and domain registration still works.

Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

#88

Post by ScaleneTriangle »

doubled112 wrote: post #71
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but I’ve been able to stream music from my desktop to my phone while driving and run a web server with reasonable performance on one.

It's more than adequate for personal use. I've also been serving myself and a few friends for years. Download being 300Mpbs but upload 20Mbps IS kind of irritating though. When did 100Mbps become popular for home LANs even?

Here in Canada all the modem/router combo units from large providers are gigabit for LAN. In pretty sure that it's been that way for at least 5 years.

I'm pretty sure new PCs and laptops have had gigabit standard for probably about 10 years.

Enthusiast and prosumer motherboards are now coming with 2.5 gigabit networking.

Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

#89

Post by throwaway984393 »

Whenever people are predicting the end of the world because of some political or cultural upheaval, I think about the internet, or airport security. There are really simple ways that any idiot could totally fuck up either of them and cause catastrophic problems. But it doesn't happen. What that shows is that the potential for catastrophe has nothing to do with catastrophe actually happening. Even if the world could fall apart around you at any moment, it's probably not going to.

Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

#90

Post by SahAssar »

charcircuit wrote: post #64
imchillyb wrote: post #19

Has no one here seen: https://www.reddit.com/r/cablefail/ There are 1000s of these pictures. The entire world's IT infrastructure has been held together with spaghetti-noodle-cabling and bodged patches for over three decades now. I'm even guilty of it. Most IT guys are guilty of it. Don't even get me started talking about how bodged together corporate codebases are. Banks are perhaps the worst offenders. Old hardware…

How "pretty" your cable routing is doesn't effect performance / reliability.

Pretty in this context mostly means predictable, which does have an effect. If you are called to fix a broken connection and you get a rats nest it will take a lot longer and might impact other users.
Post reply on HN