I was at FutureNet Expo in Boston last week where I saw a very jarring and interesting presentation made by John Day, a professor at Boston University. If you’d like to take a look at the presentation, you can find it here. John has been involved with some fairly significant projects that were responsible for the Internet we have today. He is also founding member of the Pouzin Society, an organization named for Louis Pouzin, the father of the datagram and designer of the first packet communications network. John and the Pouzin Society’s assertion is that it has been known for some time the Internet as it exists today is not properly built to scale and the backup plan is not going to be much better. Let’s examine why he and a few other folks in the know think this is true. Read more…
I just read Request For Comments (RFC) 5540 today. 40 years ago this month on April 7th, 1969, RFC 1 regarding “Host Software” authored by Steve Crocker at UCLA was published. Read more…
So is anyone out there nervous about what networks are going to do on April 1st this year? Is Conficker going to rip apart the Internet? If you’re not aware of what Conficker is, here’s some detailed analysis from SRI about a worm that people think is going to unleash a nasty attack come April 1st. I think it’s nerve racking for the average network admin. We’ve already had to live through streaming events like the presidential inauguration of Barak Obama which caused a 3x increase over the average in transit consumption for my network that day. What is everyone out there doing to prepare for the next rumored incoming threat? Let’s hope it’s a non-starter like a lot of these scares have been in the past.
There’s been a lot of brouhaha lately about the fragility of the Internet. IP addresses are running out, silly folks are breaking BGP, routers are running out of resources… for how important this little thing we call the Internet is, it’s kinda freaky. You may or may not be aware, but these three problems I detailed could be addressed by a protocol that is making it’s way into the world called Location/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP). Aside from the unfortunate acronym that it shares with the ancient programming language also called LISP, this is a pretty promising idea. Basically what it boils down to (and I’m over simplifying) is that it’s kind of like the layer 2 Ethernet methodology of tag stacking or Q-in-Q but for layer 3 IP traffic between autonomous networks. Read more…
Sometimes I’m freaked out and sometimes I’m not. We’ve been through this before, right? It’s just the classic IPv4 exhaustion scare. I’m talking back when the IANA and the RIRs used to give away classful network allocations like they were Tootsie Rolls at an Independence Day parade. Back before NAT and before IPv6 was even ratified, the fear was here. So what’s different this time? Is it real? I think there are different factors that make it more of a threat of being legit this time.
Most of you probably know how it went down but even if you do, this video is a fun refresher. So many things I’ve read detail the history of the Internet only from the DARPA perspective. This is interesting in that you get to see what France (Cyclades) and England (NPL) had to contribute.
For those who haven’t read about it, on Monday February 16th, 2009 there was a very small service provider in the Czech Republic that committed a ridiculous BGP configuration to their router causing major problems for network operators worldwide. Read more…
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