Thanks for those links Henry, and I completely agree the intriguing way forward is to determine the best way to maintain internal connectivity in those scenarios.
I'll only add some historical notes here. From all reports from the IXP in Cairo, the power was shut down in the middle of the night when there few network administrators and/or security on the premises. There's one primary IXP that runs most routes in and out of the country, and the power was literally cut. I don't know details of what happened at the second IXP, but the power going down is why the BGP routes disappeared. These details are directly from other organizations running routers at that IXP. -Adam On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 8:08 AM, Henry Sinnreich <henry.sinnre...@gmail.com> wrote: >>So p2p communication systems which avoid dependency on global DNS could >> well have worked just fine within the country, at least this time. > This is the key conclusion IMO. > As mentioned, p2p systems have their own naming structure and do not have > rely on the DNS. > > This idea started with such as “A Layered Naming Architecture for the > Internet” > http://nms.lcs.mit.edu/papers/layerednames-sigcomm04.pdf > > And is at the most recent > http://dot-p2p.org/index.php?title=Draft_Discussion_Paper > > Some implementations include the Peer Name Resolution Protocol > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PNRP > > And finally, the well publicized challenge to ICANN > http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/113010-p2p-based-alternative-to-dns-hopes.html > > Members of this list are well suited to make sense of this work and > implement a collaborative OS project, the only way IMO for acceptance and > usefulness on the Internet. Getting us back to http://dot-p2p.org/ > > Thanks, Henry > > > On 2/14/11 9:29 AM, "Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson" <b...@pagekite.net> wrote: > > Hi! > > I am surprised that no one has yet mentioned on this thread the actual > method which was used to disable the Internet in Egypt, even though it was > widely reported and relatively well understood. So here goes. :-) > > The global routing announcements for Egyptian net-blocks were simply > withdrawn by the Egyptian ISPs. Here is one of many articles explaining > this: > > http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/networking/3258743/how-egypt-pulled-the-internet-plug/ > > Note that this is not speculation, this was clearly visible to network > administrators outside Egypt, as documented here: > http://stat.ripe.net/egypt/ > > If this was the only action taken, and assuming Egyptian ISPs have peering > arrangements amongst themselves, then the local Egyptian Internet should > have worked just fine, aside from the fact that DNS is a globally shared > system and DNS resolution would have quickly become unreliable due to a lack > of access to the global root servers (unless they have global roots in > Egypt, which I do not know, but find unlikely). > > So p2p communication systems which avoid dependency on global DNS could well > have worked just fine within the country, at least this time. > > Hope this sheds some light! > > One thing which I do idly wonder about, is whether some foolhardy admins > with access to backbone infrastructure could have re-announced the withdrawn > roots and thereby switched Egypt's Internet back on from outside. This > probably wouldn't have lasted long, as the Egyptian ISPs could of course > have responded by unplugging some cables or physically powering devices > down, but it's an interesting question none the less. > > Cheers! > > _______________________________________________ > p2p-hackers mailing list > p2p-hackers@lists.zooko.com > http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers > > -- Adam Fisk http://www.littleshoot.org | http://adamfisk.wordpress.com | http://twitter.com/adamfisk _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers@lists.zooko.com http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers
