101–110 of 176 posts
It's Anti-Fragile. If it breaks all the time, everybody is highly experienced at patching together new workarounds, mechanisms for fail over are in place and regularly tested, and there's whole classes of corner case bugs that get flushed out to be stomped (or nurtured as cherished pets) instead of breeding in the dark and jumping out at you all at once. How can the "Internet routes around failure" be trusted without…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
God, this would happen all the time in the mid-90s. You joke about a backhoe in Iowa, but I'm pretty certain it was a backhoe in Iowa one time. Then the whole of the UK's traffic to the USA West Coast would be routed through an ISDN connection in Korea for three days. Your goat porn downloads from Usenet would drop from their high of 0.5Kb/sec and you'd be left with your dick in your hand. Or something.
Kids today will never know how we suffered in the Before Times
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…
You’re wrong. If say One Wilshire[1] or one of the very few other carrier hotels in its class abruptly ceased existing the Internet would be wrecked and rebuilding would be a matter of months at the very best. It doesn’t matter how many peers a big telco has when the supermajority of backbone peerings are in a handful of buildings. [1] https://one-wilshire.com/
I had a long lost picture when they were doing some street construction outside and marked all the buried cables with spray paint. Lines going everywhere…
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.
But look I live in Hong Kong, I dont feel that way: there are other backends, we could survive without the caching for a while and Google is forbidden for 1.4bn people who get on with it very well...
Depends what you call the internet. Yes, facebook and whatsapp are gone the minute one of those 3 companies screwed up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless you exist in a state of wild over abundance and are very conscientious, most working infrastructure is always at a state of almost-disrepair. If I operate a machine shop and I have 4 partially-stripped screwdrivers, I might get a new one, but inevitably I will use it until it is as stripped as all the rest, and I don’t dare throw away a tool that is currently even in partially working condition since I might n…
Are your mills in a similar state? I’m no machinist, but I would think it hard to stay in business when the means of production are constantly down for unplanned service. Screwdrivers are more of a consumable than a capital good.
It's Anti-Fragile. If it breaks all the time, everybody is highly experienced at patching together new workarounds, mechanisms for fail over are in place and regularly tested, and there's whole classes of corner case bugs that get flushed out to be stomped (or nurtured as cherished pets) instead of breeding in the dark and jumping out at you all at once. How can the "Internet routes around failure" be trusted without…
EDIT: I have a soft spot for the person who is so over it that they sit around pontificating the meaning of the word broken instead of actually getting up and helping in the midst of an emergency. Because half the time that's me. When prod is on fire every day, eventually that becomes the norm.
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.
Back in the 90s when I got on, so much of traffic was exchanged at MAE-West or MAE-East, and a backhoe in Iowa could make nearly all the cross-US traffic go through Europe and Asia instead. These days, there are lively public internet exchanges up and down both coasts, in texas and chicago and elsewhere. A well placed backhoe can still make a big mess, many 'redundant fibers' are in the same strand, and last mile is…
As I understand it is continuously almost hand-tuned machine and enough misconfiguration or entities simply stopping to exist much of the transit capacity would be gone. Works well enough when it is not touched and there is someone on call to fix it, but specially if later was gone? How robust and self-correcting is it really? My guess is probably not at all...
It's Anti-Fragile. If it breaks all the time, everybody is highly experienced at patching together new workarounds, mechanisms for fail over are in place and regularly tested, and there's whole classes of corner case bugs that get flushed out to be stomped (or nurtured as cherished pets) instead of breeding in the dark and jumping out at you all at once. How can the "Internet routes around failure" be trusted without…
"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.
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…