--On Tuesday, June 18, 2002 11:52 AM -0700 Vadim Antonov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Er... back then it took 2 months to learn everything a backbone engineer > had to know. Nowadays it's an alphabet soup of stupid techniques to > achieve the same result - i.e. to deliver a packet from place A to place > B. Blame greeeeedy vendors (OFRV, particularly, and don't forget > hellcore) who sell FUD instead of making their products easy to use. > Given their dominant position on the market, everyone else has to be > "compatible" with the zillion little features just to stay afloat.
that's an interesting point of view. i would say that really nothing at all has changed in 10 years. sure, there is a bag-of-stupid-ip-tricks to choose from that didn't exist back then but none of the tricks have solved our problems. the political/financial issues crept in, and the bag-of-stupid-ip-tricks seems to have developed as a way to solve those issues, which they have not solved. the same level of fundamental knowledge required back then applies today, and many network and systems engineers are *still* lacking that knowledge. i suppose your are right if you're implying that the bag-of-stupid-ip-tricks has obfuscated what's really important. uucp and modems are looking pretty attractive to me again. > Regarding the diameter of the Internet - I'm still trying to figure out > why the hell anyone would want to have "edge" routers (instead of dumb > TDMs) if not for inability of IOS to support large numbers of virtual > interfaces. Same story goes for "clusters" of backbone routers. everyone note: vadim threw that can of worms, it wasn't me! -b