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The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

krebsonsecurity.com

151–160 of 176 posts

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

#151
post #91

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/

As a network person who's worked at multiple major global transit networks: lol no.

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

#152
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

If it works well and works reliably, even when it needs to be changed quickly - it's not a bad solution, unless it costs too much.

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

#153
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://thecrow.uk/A-Gov.uk-site-dedicated-to-porn-Absolutel... From yesterday. Note the bit about being on a Pi. Stood up quite admirably to an HN hug. From 1998 to 2004 I served a fairly large amount of traffic out of my homebuilt pentium in a trailer out in the woods with an ISDN line. We stood up to several media mentions OK.

> Stood up quite admirably to an HN hug.

It was down when I tried it yesterday.

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

#154
post #130
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You alread listed 3 single points of failure. I get what you mean: the entry point search engine, the global cache and the global backend/storage/compute. 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 ar…

OK, you think 1.4 billion people without the freedom to search is ok? LOL.

I wouldn't say Google is search, per se. I haven't used Google for search in a few years.

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

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Setting up, monitoring and maintaining LE isn't free

It all happens automatically after a setup process that takes less than a minute.

I’ve spent hours fixing, debugging and upgrading LE clients this year. “I’m doing it wrong” I’m sure

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

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bob Metcalfe repeatedly predicted a "gigalapse" which he defined as a loss of one billion hours of Internet connectivity. Bob would say look at how fragile this all is, and his point wasn't (although at the time it would too often be portrayed this way) "the Internet will fail" because Bob isn't actually an idiot, but it also shows a substantial lack of foresight anyway. Of course ~everybody will have the Network, th…

If a Gigalapse is about 12 minutes these days (given 4.66 billion people on the Internet), a Teralapse would be about 9 days of no Internet for all of us.

What a fascinating experiment that would be. I’d imagine the majority of people would have no idea what to do without the internet for days. Does my remote job e been exist? It would be surreal

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

#158
Some of this has to do with IPv4 and massive carrier NAT schemes. If technical people could get an ASN easier and route with each other on IPv6 it theoretically could provide backup paths for neighborhood level traffic. I guess the transit/ISP would have to enforce something like BGPsec with these little peers to prevent mistakes or malicious ASNs.
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