“BGP is literally the glue of the Internet” - I think you’ll find BGP is figuratively the glue of the Internet ;)
I think BGP is more of a mucus than glue
Why Google Went Offline Today and a Bit about How the Internet Works
131–140 of 158 posts
Re: Why Google Went Offline Today and a Bit about How the Internet Works
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curious why such a specific time period. Is there a source for 1680s? The 17th century would probably be sufficient otherwise.
OED has the source if you have access to it, which I don't or I would provide it here.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=literally&allow...
Etymonline does not reproduce the OED, but it does source from it and sometimes you get lucky.
Re: Why Google Went Offline Today and a Bit about How the Internet Works
#133"I'm a network engineer at CloudFlare and I played a small part in helping ensure Google came back online." Uhh, no. Without the "ensure", then maybe.
Even without the "ensure" ... what did this network engineer at CloudFlare do anyway? it was a hardware failure.
He filed a bug report.
Re: Why Google Went Offline Today and a Bit about How the Internet Works
#134Isn't the title a touch sensationalist? Google did not go "offline": it was briefly unavailable for a relatively small number of networks.
For the people affected, google was for all purposes "offline". If the estimate of 3–5% of the internet population is correct, that's a lot of people.
Re: Why Google Went Offline Today and a Bit about How the Internet Works
#135DAE think that the whole "BGP is broken!" argument is a bit overblown? If you're going to have a bunch of autonomous systems/networks operating together, with no central authority, it necessarily comes down to trust and relationships. Shit will occasionally happen. It's important to look at outages, figure out the cause, and work to prevent it. Perhaps, though, this is a best practices issue, and not some fundamental…
Your comment reminds me of this quote from Linus Torvalds:
"If you have ever done any security work – and it did not involve the concept of "network of trust" – it wasn't security work, it was – masturbation. I don't know what you were doing. But trust me, it's the only way you can do security, it's the only way you can do development."
Re: Why Google Went Offline Today and a Bit about How the Internet Works
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
OED has the source if you have access to it, which I don't or I would provide it here.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=literally&allow... Etymonline does not reproduce the OED, but it does source from it and sometimes you get lucky.
Thanks for the link! It's fairly interesting, too. That citation specifically reads: 'Erroneously used in reference to metaphors, hyperbole, etc., even by writers like Dryden and Pope, to indicate "what follows must be taken in the strongest admissible sense" (1680s), which is opposite to the word's real meaning.'
So for one, it states clearly 'erroneously used' (and indeed has this specific wording, 'strongest admissible sense').
Further, gives the 1680 number, but doesn't actually source that any further (general writing periods of Dryden and Pope? Perhaps, though not clear).
Anyway, that's fun. I miss the OED, but it's the sort of massive tome that's impractical to always have on hand.
Re: Why Google Went Offline Today and a Bit about How the Internet Works
#137At some point anonymous is going to figure out the bgp 'hack' is actually exploitable, unlike taking the root name servers offline and we see a network routing outage for several days. I wish it wasn't so but sometimes that is the only way these things get fixed
First of all to pull off this "hack" you need a router, an AS number, a transit contract with your upstream provider, BGP configured with said upstream, and most importantly your upstream needs to be negligent enough to not apply route filters to your session (which basically means I will only accept routes for IPs owned by company X over company X's session). Secondly, it is pretty easy to track down who is doing it…
Well said, dsl. Almost two decades ago I used to run an ISP in another country, and remember that BGP was already reasonably safe at the time (when v4 started to be implemented), with peers normally rejecting route updates from blocks outside your control.
Yes, there's always the risk of a trusted peer mistakenly leaking routes publicly (and a permissive upstream provider not rejecting it outright), but that's a low risk attack vector.
I do remember this happening a few times, but were quickly spotted and corrected (true, the internet at the time was a lot smaller; you could probably fit all sysadmins of a country in a room..)
I see this article as the CloudFlare guy trying to get credit for an act of civility that many other sysadmins likely have done, silently, in parallel. Of course I'm glad he did, but wouldn't expect anything less. That's just how the internet works.
ps: thanks for the link. NANOG is something that I had long ago erased from my brain. Had a chuckle looking at the archives :)
Re: Why Google Went Offline Today and a Bit about How the Internet Works
#138Can 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?
BGP and DNS run on TCP which runs on IP. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model
In terms of understanding the Internet, the OSI model is less useful than the Internet model outlined in RFC 1122 and RFC 1123, because the OSI model persists in making distinctions without a difference, like the separation of the Application and Presentation layers. (Frankly, most of the time the Link layer is entirely determined by the Physical layer, so that distinction is also of marginal use in the real world.)
On a more historical note, the Internet protocol suite beat the OSI protocol suite. Practically nobody uses the OSI protocols anymore, so why bother trying to fit the Internet protocols into the OSI model?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite
Re: Why Google Went Offline Today and a Bit about How the Internet Works
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Context.
"Hello, 911? Yeah, I've got an unconscious person here. His face is literally purple." Did I mean literally literally, or figuratively? And how can the previous question have meaning?
You remove the emphasizer and just say: "His face is purple."
Re: Why Google Went Offline Today and a Bit about How the Internet Works
#140At some point anonymous is going to figure out the bgp 'hack' is actually exploitable, unlike taking the root name servers offline and we see a network routing outage for several days. I wish it wasn't so but sometimes that is the only way these things get fixed
First of all to pull off this "hack" you need a router, an AS number, a transit contract with your upstream provider, BGP configured with said upstream, and most importantly your upstream needs to be negligent enough to not apply route filters to your session (which basically means I will only accept routes for IPs owned by company X over company X's session). Secondly, it is pretty easy to track down who is doing it…
Correct of course, you would need to compromise the infrastructure of an ISP. Not that a few hundred dollars or a USB stick drive at the right place couldn't do it. Especially for a less well travelled part of the Internet.