The internet is held together with spit and baling wire • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by convolvatron » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 2:03 AM UTC

ragingrobot wrote: post #27

zwkrt wrote: post #8

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…

Imagine you use that last screwdriver, and a job needs to get done, and your car won't start so you can't get a new one at a hardware store outside of walking or cycling distance. And now you're unable to repair a vital system. As I was writing that, I was just thinking of the recent Surfside collapse, what would would have happened if the regions data networks had gone down simultaneously (by chance). A major event…

if you have a file and a piece of round you have a screwdriver in whatever shape you need it to be.

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

#132

Post by dkubb » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 2:05 AM UTC

FredPret wrote: post #129

h2odragon wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kids today will never know how we suffered in the Before Times

boobs.jpg loading one line at a time and then greying out completely before reaching the bottom

This is where you'd choose the .gif version hoping it was interlaced.

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

#133

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 2:17 AM UTC

h2odragon wrote: post #99

kingcharles wrote: post #94

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

[deleted]

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

#134

Post by walrus01 » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 2:32 AM UTC

Krebs is not wrong but he also doesn't get into how many things are "verified" through an even older mechanism, the LOA (letter of authorization/letter of authority), which is literally just an actual letter on one corporate entity's letterhead, specifying some CIDR-notation prefixes/ranges that are permitted to be announced by that entity's upstreams, signed by a corporate officer. Often in the form of a raster scanned PDF.

BGP4 in general dates back to a time when everybody trusted each other and the global routing table/network engineering community was a much smaller thing. We've been trying to glue better things on top of it for 25+ years.

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

#135

Post by rabbits77 » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 2:36 AM UTC

paxys wrote: post #13

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.

What original topology are you talking about? There was never a time when your end consumer device could be used as even a semi-reliable web server.

I worked at a small ISP/web host in the late 90s. A very common web server at the time was a cheap white box PC running Windows NT and IIS. We had many of these systems on this interesting “rack” that was more like a multi level table or three d chess board.

These systems could handle a ton of traffic very reliably. Consider that there was very little dynamic content and what there was barely taxed the CPU at all (e.g. a Perl CGI script to query and display some tiny amount of data from (LOL!) an Access database.

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

#136

Post by walrus01 » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 2:43 AM UTC

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…

Have literally seen major things taken out because somebody tripped over the $5 power strip to the sole authoritative nameserver and nobody realized/cared for years that the authoritative ns2/ns3 weren't really receiving zone transfers.

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

#137

Post by betterunix2 » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 2:44 AM UTC

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.

WWW != Internet

Yes, for the majority of users the two may be the same, but "The Internet" is the IPv4 and IPv6 network on which the web runs. The equivalent companies to what you named are the transit network operators, companies like Hurricane Electric, AT&T, CenturyLink, etc. The list of transit networks is very long, much longer than the list of major web hosting companies.

Now, that said, it is absolutely true that there are ways where major outages can be the result of just one failure. Last year there was a major outage on the US east cost after a Verizon fiber optic line was severed in NYC; it turns out that this line carried many supposedly redundant links, all bundled into a single cable. The failure of that line then caused a cascade of failures as rerouted traffic began overwhelming other systems, but in the end the outage was contained in a relatively small geographic region, albeit one with many Internet users.

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

#138

Post by chasd00 » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 2:46 AM UTC

You know what? I get the feeling that _everything_ is held together with only spit and baling wire.

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

#139

Post by tacocataco » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 2:50 AM UTC

FredPret wrote: post #129

h2odragon wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kids today will never know how we suffered in the Before Times

boobs.jpg loading one line at a time and then greying out completely before reaching the bottom

Good thing I'm into legs... They loaded first.

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

#140

Post by betterunix2 » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 2:56 AM UTC

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/

...maybe. Pretty sure the "wreck" would be local to the region around LA, and maybe a few of the countries on the other end of those lines. The immediate effect of an unexpected outage (e.g. the physical destruction of the building) would probably be a lot of rerouted traffic overwhelming systems "nearby" (in the topology of the Internet) for a few hours. It would not take months to recover even in the absolute worst case.