Packet Rancher

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…

jason Featured, Network News bgp, internet, lisp

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…

jason Featured, Service Provider bgp, internet, lisp