101–110 of 158 posts
Isn't the title a touch sensationalist? Google did not go "offline": it was briefly unavailable for a relatively small number of networks.
If you're interested in peering (couldn't resist the pun) behind the curtain, read the NANOG[1] mailing list. These are the real guys keeping the Internet up and running :) [1]: http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/
Does anyone know of a book that goes from the basics of networking up to how it's all assembled on a large scale?
A "big book of internet" if you will.
And nothing will change. At least not until someone does this with malicious intent - script kiddie A knocks out big site, or a censoring state decides that it should block a free speech site from the entire Internet.
A much more useful thing to do than take out a big site is use BGP to create your own "section of the internet" to do your malicious deeds from, then afterwards remove the BGP routes and your addresses will no longer exist on the internet. So it will be as if you sent packets from a phantom network.
http://archive.routeviews.org/oix-route-views/ http://www.pch.net/resources/data.php?dir=/routing-tables (link appears to be temporarily broken)
There is an IETF WG called SIDR, which is working on solving this problem of invalid BGP announcements. A good summary is available here http://isoc.org/wp/ietfjournal/?p=2438 and technical details are in the related proposals.
The author (Tom Paseka) wrote near the conclusion that himself addressed the Google's issue, by contacting a Moratel's engineer. Do you have the same feeling when reading the article? It sounds weird that Google did not triggered a recovery procedure on its own. Maybe I see bad things everywhere and you may call paranoïd, but could it be some sort of ("false") advertising on the side of cloudfare?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would say the resilience is what impresses me here. The fact that it's decentralized means that anyone can fix the internet. The fact that this one specific problem was fixed within 26 min by individuals realizing the problem and acting to fix it gives me a warm feeling.
I think what you mean is that anyone can break the internet (in this case a random ISP from Indonesia) and that in that case only very specific people could fix it (probably at least a senior network engineer at said ISP).
Isn't the title a touch sensationalist? Google did not go "offline": it was briefly unavailable for a relatively small number of networks.
You can't win. If you quote the title given, people complain. If you change it to something more accurate, the mods change it back, and then people complain anyway.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would it be possible to claim to own Google's IP, then on receiving the packets intended for Google forward them on to the real IP (without accidentally forwarding them back to yourself)? That way someone could hijack & interrogate these packets without being spotted (at least without causing service outage / only adding slight delay). Alternatively could they route these requests to a clone as an advanced phishing s…
Wouldn't the packets that forwarded on to the real Google just get routed right aback to them, because the rest of the world thinks they are Google? It might work for somebody like China, where they have two network interfaces, so can make all Chinese networks think they are Google on one interface, then forward things on to the real Google on the other. There might be a good reason for them to do it, too, because th…
Can I ask a pretty newbie question - how is BGP connected to IP, TCP and DNS protocols? Is it sitting "below" them, "on top" of them, or is it somewhere else?
First, TCP and DNS don't come into it: they both piggyback on IP (TCP directly; DNS via UDP in typical use), so IP is all that's really relevant. BGP is how routers communicate with each other. Every major edge router for a network is typically connected to many other edge routers for other networks. Each router announces what amounts to their complete routing table: i.e., for every IPv4/IPv6 address that they know h…