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The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

krebsonsecurity.com

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

#111

Post by xattt »

toast0 wrote: post #30
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.

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…

This happened with regular phone service as recent as 2017 in Canada (1).

(1) https://atlantic.ctvnews.ca/mobile/many-atlantic-canadians-l...

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

#112

Post by throw0101a »

User23 wrote: post #91
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…

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/

First off, I'm on the east coast-ish, so I'm not sure how much traffic I get from APAC.

Next off, the their front page says:

> Carrier-Neutral with Access to 200+ Carriers

You're telling me these 200+ carriers have no other POPs?

Going to their "Connectivity" page, they show four trans-Pacific cable that land there:

* https://one-wilshire.com/connectivity/

Meanwhile there are a whole bunch of other trans-Pacific cables landing on the US West Coast:

* https://www.submarinecablemap.com

As someone who lives in Toronto, I certainly worry about how concentrated TORIX is, but even it has three physical locations (IIRC), and most folks connect elsewhere as well from the spelunking I've done in BGP.

So if one of these major carrier hotels does have a problem, I don't doubt that there would be repercussions, but I'm not worried about "the Internet" as a whole.

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

#113

Post by yazanobeidi »

You’d be surprised what goes on in Level 0… who works there, how they work, the hour-by-hour. Even at a big company that handles most of the world’s credit card transactions at their biggest data centre, for example. It would absolutely blow your mind. It’s amazing the internet works as reliably as it does!

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

#116

Post by dukeyukey »

h2odragon wrote: post #6

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…

Hah, that's a good way of seeing it.

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

#118

Post by ronnier »

Ekaros wrote: post #108

I have kinda wondered how robust Internet would truly be if the proverbial stuff really hit a fan. I mean proper nuclear wars or economies including large ISP going down with admins dying or being fired on left and right. Specially with all of the talk of global crypto and so on... As I understand it is continuously almost hand-tuned machine and enough misconfiguration or entities simply stopping to exist much of the…

It wouldn’t work. Just look at what happens during bad storms.
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