In a message written on Thu, Oct 06, 2005 at 06:36:00PM -0400, Lamar Owen wrote: > All philosophy aside, it does bother me that a simple single depeering can > cause such an uproar in a network supposedly immune to nuclear war (even > though the Internet was not designed from the start to survive nuclear war; > Paul Baran's packet-switching work aside; reference 'Where Wizards Stay Up > Late' which quotes Taylor and others on the origins of the ARPAnet portion of > the old Internet). I shudder to think of what would happen if there were to > be a real problem (I mean, really, one link (out of many thousands) is down > and the Sky Is Falling!). What happened to resiliency?
I've seen a lot of comments about the "disruption" caused by this
depeering event, and what would happen if $bad_thing happened.
I point you back a few weeks to when the hurricane hit. You need
look no further to see people offering up their assistance to those
in need. Look back further to 9-11, and people offering networking
help to those who's infrastructure was damaged.
I have no doubt that if the Level 3 / Cogent issue had been caused
by a pre-emptive nuclear strike and the nation was called to arms
that virtually every ISP that connects to both would be offering
them free transit to get them reconnected.
Indeed, I could log into my routers now and fix the Cogent / Level
3 problem with about 3 minutes of typing. It would cost my company
thousands of dollars to do so, so I'm not going to do it. As I
said before, right now this is a business problem. By the same
token, if we were just attacked and Level 3 and Cogent were both,
together, asking for help I'd log in and have them working as fast
as I could type. I bet others would as well.
Level 3 and Cogent are able to fix their own problems in this case,
either by making up, or by entering into a business relationship
with a third party to fix it. This is also a problem that they,
themselves created. That's the difference here.
I've got a new set of rules to add to this thread:
If you don't have enable on a router, and you've never negotiated
peering with a transit free ISP then you're not qualified to comment.
You really don't understand what's going on here, and it's not, I
repeat, not a technical problem. There is nothing wrong with the
technology, architecture, or anything else. There is something
wrong with the business model of one, or both of these companies.
--
Leo Bicknell - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - CCIE 3440
PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
Read TMBG List - [EMAIL PROTECTED], www.tmbg.org
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