Re: [admin] Re: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest (Qatar to UAE)
On Feb 4, 2008, at 4:29 AM, Alex Pilosov wrote: This conversation is quickly spinning into discussion of politics and terrorism. Reminder to all, please stick to the *operational* aspects of this thread. In all the fuss about terrorism, people may be forgetting that the terrorists have goals *other* than terrorism, and one of those is reducing the influence of the West over the Middle East. Removing internet connections certainly is an effective (and probably necessary) step in that direction. Even if this was accidental, it will have made them more aware of the possibility. Which leads me to my operational question. If you know that someone wants to cut your cables. What defense do you have? Is there any practical way to monitor and protect an oceanic cable? Are there ways to build them that would make them less discoverable? Some way to provide redundancy? A non-physical solution involving underwater repeaters? Or is this like pipelines in Iraq?
RE: [admin] Re: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest (Qatar to UAE)
I have not looked at a map. My guess is that most of these cables are linear - point-to-point. Obviously a more robust architecture is a ring. All TransAtlantic cables are rings, but can you justify the economic cost of a ring architecture to serve relatively small countries? Hmm ... Despite the needless worrying about terrorism, the single most important factor is how well a cable is buried. Deeper is better and more expensive. To bury a cable, you dig a deep trench, drop the cable in it, and let Nature cover it. Nature is very good at doing so ... Roderick S. Beck Director of European Sales Hibernia Atlantic 1, Passage du Chantier, 75012 Paris http://www.hiberniaatlantic.com
Re: [admin] Re: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest (Qatar to UAE)
On 2/4/08, Kee Hinckley [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: If you know that someone wants to cut your cables. What defense do you have? Is there any practical way to monitor and protect an oceanic cable? Are there ways to build them that would make them less discoverable? Some way to provide redundancy? A non-physical solution involving underwater repeaters? Or is this like pipelines in Iraq? While reading the hacker tourist article someone posted from Wired many years ago, it mentioned that as the FO cable comes closer to shore, more extreme measures are taken to protect it, including fluidizing the sand underneath the cable to cause the cable to sink under, and then stopping the fluidizing process so the sand compacts above it. I'm unsure how practical this would be along a substantial link of cable though. (Although, burying the cable under compact sand seems like it would protect it from a whole host of dangers). -brandon
Re: [admin] Re: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest (Qatar to UAE)
Alex Pilosov wrote: This conversation is quickly spinning into discussion of politics and terrorism. Reminder to all, please stick to the *operational* aspects of this thread. -alex [NANOG MLC Chair] Agreed. In December of 2005, for reasons entirely personal, I read every paper available at the Dudley Knox (Naval Post Graduate School) and the Air University (Maxwell AFB) Libraries mentioned in Greta Marlatt's 06/00 IO bibliography -- Information Warfare Information Operations (IW/IO). A Bibliography, Documents, Theses Technical Reports. This is a snap-shot of where IO was five year ago. People who want to flesh out a modern IO reading list please mail me (off-list) your URLs. In a nutshell, there were many, many operationally unsophisticated and more-dangerous-to-self-then-other ideas in these papers, in addition to alot of Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) Wonder-Cruft, and a lot of it was blatent fund-me stuff. My two beads worth, Eric
RE: [admin] Re: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest (Qatar to UAE)
The US Navy will deploy their killer ninja dolphins to bottlenose any wrong doers :@) -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Kee Hinckley Sent: 04 February 2008 17:08 To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: [admin] Re: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest (Qatar to UAE) On Feb 4, 2008, at 4:29 AM, Alex Pilosov wrote: This conversation is quickly spinning into discussion of politics and terrorism. Reminder to all, please stick to the *operational* aspects of this thread. In all the fuss about terrorism, people may be forgetting that the terrorists have goals *other* than terrorism, and one of those is reducing the influence of the West over the Middle East. Removing internet connections certainly is an effective (and probably necessary) step in that direction. Even if this was accidental, it will have made them more aware of the possibility. Which leads me to my operational question. If you know that someone wants to cut your cables. What defense do you have? Is there any practical way to monitor and protect an oceanic cable? Are there ways to build them that would make them less discoverable? Some way to provide redundancy? A non-physical solution involving underwater repeaters? Or is this like pipelines in Iraq?
Re: [admin] Re: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest (Qatar to UAE)
On Mon, 4 Feb 2008, Brandon Galbraith wrote: While reading the hacker tourist article someone posted from Wired many years ago, it mentioned that as the FO cable comes closer to shore, more extreme measures are taken to protect it, including fluidizing the sand underneath the cable to cause the cable to sink under, and then stopping the fluidizing process so the sand compacts above it. I'm unsure how practical this would be along a substantial link of cable though. (Although, burying the cable under compact sand seems like it would protect it from a whole host of dangers). -brandon I have spent a few hours on a cable repair ship in the Med. Fascinating - highly recommended. This ship was sent to repair multiple spots of a cable that was cut about 1km from the shore. There was a gas pipeline that was laid across it and they built special concrete bridges in the water that were laid on top the fiber cable so that the fiber cable would be in the tunnel under the mini-bridge and the pipeline was laid on top. Worked well for the first few months. But the weight kept bearing down and the concrete bridge sunk deeper and deeper into the sand - and eventually the bridge tunnel acted as a guillotine and severed the underlying fiber. So much for the best laid plans of fish and men. -Hank
Re: [admin] Re: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest (Qatar to UAE)
On Mon, 4 Feb 2008, Kee Hinckley wrote: Which leads me to my operational question. If you know that someone wants to cut your cables. What defense do you have? Is there any practical way to monitor and protect an oceanic cable? Are there ways to build them that would make them less discoverable? Some way to provide redundancy? A non-physical solution involving underwater repeaters? Or is this like pipelines in Iraq? The other answer is to be less dependent on the cables. Some communications need to be long distance -- talking to a specific person in a far away place, setting up import/export deals, calling tech support -- but a lot don't. E-mailing or VOIP calling your neighbors, looking at web sites for local businesses, reading your local newspaper or accessing other local content, or telecommuting across town, all ought to be able to be done locally, without dependence on international infrastructure. Yet we keep seeing articles about outages of Internet and long distance telephone networks, implying that this Internet thing we've all been working on is pretty fragile compared to the old fashioned phone networks we've been trying to replace. The report from Renesys (http://www.renesys.com/blog/2008/02/mediterranean_cable_break_part.shtml) looks at outages in connectivity to India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Egypt. I'll assume that those areas probably did keep some local connectivity. India has its NIXI exchanges, although my understanding is that they're not as well used as one might hope. Saudi Arabia has a monopoly international transit provider, which should have the effect of keeping local traffic local. Egypt has an exchange point. I don't know about Pakistan or Kuwait. Unfortunately, little else works without DNS. Pakistan and India have DNS root servers, but Pakistan's .PK ccTLD is served entirely from the US. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Egypt all have servers for their local ccTLDs, but do not have local root DNS servers. Of that list, only India has both the root and their ccTLD hosted locally. And then there's the rest of the services people use. Being able to get to DNS doesn't help people talk to their neighbors if both they and their neighbors are using mail services in far away places, for instance. -Steve
Re: [admin] Re: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest (Qatar to UAE)
Hey, me next! Or it could be a US (or other) attempt to disrupt some terrorist operation in progress which was designed to be coordinated over the internet. I think all this speculation, at best, just reveals the limitations of peoples' imaginations. Is there any triangulation of disruption for the cable cuts? Just curious, but that's a bit more operational in nature. -- -Barry Shein The World | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Login: Nationwide Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
RE: [admin] Re: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest (Qatar to UAE)
My experience is that a lot of the BB providers route through NAPs/MAEs when they have local peering. The Internet IS more brittle than it needs to be, because routing seems to be a lot more static than it should be. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Steve Gibbard Sent: Monday, February 04, 2008 12:39 PM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: [admin] Re: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest (Qatar to UAE) On Mon, 4 Feb 2008, Kee Hinckley wrote: Which leads me to my operational question. If you know that someone wants to cut your cables. What defense do you have? Is there any practical way to monitor and protect an oceanic cable? Are there ways to build them that would make them less discoverable? Some way to provide redundancy? A non-physical solution involving underwater repeaters? Or is this like pipelines in Iraq? The other answer is to be less dependent on the cables. Some communications need to be long distance -- talking to a specific person in a far away place, setting up import/export deals, calling tech support -- but a lot don't. E-mailing or VOIP calling your neighbors, looking at web sites for local businesses, reading your local newspaper or accessing other local content, or telecommuting across town, all ought to be able to be done locally, without dependence on international infrastructure. Yet we keep seeing articles about outages of Internet and long distance telephone networks, implying that this Internet thing we've all been working on is pretty fragile compared to the old fashioned phone networks we've been trying to replace. The report from Renesys (http://www.renesys.com/blog/2008/02/mediterranean_cable_break _part.shtml) looks at outages in connectivity to India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Egypt. I'll assume that those areas probably did keep some local connectivity. India has its NIXI exchanges, although my understanding is that they're not as well used as one might hope. Saudi Arabia has a monopoly international transit provider, which should have the effect of keeping local traffic local. Egypt has an exchange point. I don't know about Pakistan or Kuwait. Unfortunately, little else works without DNS. Pakistan and India have DNS root servers, but Pakistan's .PK ccTLD is served entirely from the US. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Egypt all have servers for their local ccTLDs, but do not have local root DNS servers. Of that list, only India has both the root and their ccTLD hosted locally. And then there's the rest of the services people use. Being able to get to DNS doesn't help people talk to their neighbors if both they and their neighbors are using mail services in far away places, for instance. -Steve
