October 1996 - Test - lists.nanog.org

Re: Internet II is coming...
by Kent W. England 10 Oct '96

10 Oct '96

At 05:20 PM 09-10-96 -0400, Fletcher E Kittredge wrote: >So a 10Mbps fiber ATM circuit translates, after the cell tax and >packet stredding, to 6Mbps on a real link. Is this not slow enough to >be a bottleneck? > >regards, >fletcher > > Even if a 10Mbps ATM circuit resulted in as little as a 6Mbps TCP payload, then PPP would give you about 7.2Mbps, since ATM costs you about 12% over PPP, given measured packet size distributions from FIX West. Is this not slow enough to be a bottleneck? --Kent

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RE: Internet II is coming...
by Jim Browning 10 Oct '96

10 Oct '96

>From: Robert E. Seastrom[SMTP:rs@bifrost.seastrom.com] >Sent: Thursday, October 10, 1996 3:19 AM > From: Jim Browning <jfbb(a)atmnet.net> > > >| Oh, and by the way, given that the local loop provider has OC-48 SONET > >| provisioned to this particular location, we could just as easily have > >| provisioned the connection to our backbone at OC12 as opposed to OC3. > Did > >| I miss the Cisco announcement of an OC12 IP-SONET card? > > > >You may wish to discuss an NDA presentation on the forthcoming > >generation of routers from each of Cisco, Juniper and Bay Networks. > > Again, my post was based upon your assertion that this could be done today. > I sincerely hope that a new generation of routers is forthcoming asap that > can match ATM speeds. > >So, Jim, since your metric is what can be done _today_, could you tell >us just exactly how many ATM switch vendors can offer me _working_ >(not beta) OC12 interface cards _today_? The only one that I can >think of off the top of my head that I'd be willing to risk my >credibility as an engineer with management by going with is Fore. Of >course, that assumes that I'd be willing to risk my credibility as an >engineer by spec'ing ATM in the first place, which is a shaky >proposition to say the least. One is more than zero (which is what is available today with other technologies), and if you refer to Sean's original post, it was also focused on a single, albeit different, vendor. As the saying goes; what's good for the goose, is good for the gander. And BTW, the _today_ metric is Sean's, not mine.. You can flame ATM all you want, but you can _not_ credibly claim that router technology can _today_ provide _everything_ that can be done by adding ATM to the equation. Feel free to question the technology, as that leads to improvement. But please don't respond to legitimate argument with obfuscation. Sean made a statement. I challenged it with specific (working today) examples. The only arguments put forth in response can be paraphrased as "we don't need that capability on the Internet", and "ATM sucks". Neither one refutes my argument. -- Jim

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RE: Internet II is coming...
by ckbr＠snt.bellsouth.com 10 Oct '96

10 Oct '96

Sean Doran wrote: >In the brave new world of an ATM-free future (assuming the ATM people >don't get _cheap_ SVCs out the door before we get the "Peter-Tony Protocol" would you mind expanding a bit on why SVCs would do the job? We're trying to determine if it's a service worth offering anytime soon, who would use it, etc., -Carolyn Reuss Science & Technology BellSouth

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Re: Internet II is coming...
by swolff＠cisco.com 10 Oct '96

10 Oct '96

At 5:42 PM 96-10-09, Stephen Balbach wrote: >On Wed, 9 Oct 1996, Stephen Wolff wrote: > >> >Even with "recreational" use of the Internet, the Internet today is much >> >faster then it was 6 years ago (T1 national backbone (singular)). >> >> <ahem> UUNET had one. PSI had one. NASA had one and so did DoE. Oh yes >> NSF had one too. > >..and everyone fairly pulled thier equal weight.. ;) ACK. -s Stephen Wolff Business Development ciscoSystems 202 337 1213

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Re: Internet II is coming...
by swolff＠cisco.com 10 Oct '96

10 Oct '96

>The fiber infrastructure and the multiplexer infrastructure are good enough >to support both Internet and Internet II. What the Internet lacks for >Internet II today is IP tunnels with QoS. So I think that one IP >infrastructure could be good enough for both and will be some day. This I >believe. :-) It **is** one IP infrastructure. The difference between a corporate intranet and the academic version - I-II - is the stringency of AUP observance and enforcement. >BTW, is someone going to build traffic monitors and diagnostic tools into >the Internet II infrastructure? Any new inter-domain routing protocols? >Source demand routing? QoS? Or are the universities satisfied with just more >bandwidth? One reason for any vendor to participate is to try such things in the fiercely critical yet basically friendly academic community. -s Stephen Wolff Business Development ciscoSystems 202 337 1213

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Make Money Fast (Internet II )
by Ehud Gavron 10 Oct '96

10 Oct '96

I work 80 hours a week not only because I'm an IP engineer*, but also because I'm a consultant and a business owner of an ISP. If there will be an Internet II, I see LOTS AND LOTS of opportunities for any person with a brain, and even some CNEs. For an Internet II to be designed, implemented, maintained, connected to R&E sites all over the country, and successfully, LOTS of consulting dollars are going to be spent. As someone who actually understands packets, headers, routing, etc. I suspect I'll be quite busy. This is good. For an Internet II to be successful, it will HAVE to be interconnected to The Internet. (That's "Internet I" in "Internet II"-Speak). These interconnects will include cool things like "settlements" and other phone-speak some of us have been fighting since 1985, or they will provide lots of unrestricted fed-funds to commercial ISPs. (can you guess which one I think's going to happen.) THIS TOO is a golden business opportunity. In short, who cares whether academia dreamed this up or not. Who cares if it will work tomorrow with 8ms coast-to-coast (Thanks, Vadim, for bringing physics into it ;) or whether or not it will be instantly perfect like the Internet is ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^ the first time at sex ^H^H^H^H^H^H like Star Trek I ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H well, like something that's instantly perfect the first time, even though I can't come up with any examples. No, this is not a feel-good note. This is just my way of saying "It's been rather quiet on NANOG, and Internet II's only connection to NANOG is how we work with/interconnect/plan such a network. Not whether academicians ought to shave and get real jobs." Ehud * Ob rant: I'm tired of guys who've ``practiced'' cisco ``scripts'' and call themselves IP engineers. They ``know'' something because they've seen it before -- not because they understand it, could engineer it differently, or could do the underlying concepts under a different paradigm. I realize we can't all know everything, but I'm really tired of those who know nothing and have humongous egos.

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Re: Fractal models of Big-I Internet
by Vadim Antonov 09 Oct '96

09 Oct '96

>Given that real world systems that exhibit fractal behaviors can now often >be modelled mathematically, do you know of anyone who has attempted to >apply such fractal models to Internet traffic? Self-similar traffic patterns are hard to work with (and were discovered only recently). For one, inter-arrival times in self-similar stream have infinite variance. That sure screws up a lot of math generally used in queueing theory. It is also hard to generate (there are no known efficient methods of producing self-similar streams) and stochastical models using it are not reliable (infinite variance again). >When designing protocols >do researchers take this fractal nature into account? Researchers do not design things. They smash things and watch what resulting particles do :) On a more serious note, at least there are some indications of what will NOT work with fractal traffic. Packet shredding for example. >I suppose the second question would be somewhat moot if there is not yet >an accepted fractal model to math the Internet... It is still a research topic, to a large extent. There are results to the effect that even connection arrival processes are self-similar and not Poisson as was previously thought, which may mean that connection oriented schemes like ATM will go bust in large-scale networks. --vadim

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Re: Fractal models of Big-I Internet
by Vern Paxson 09 Oct '96

09 Oct '96

> Given that real world systems that exhibit fractal behaviors can now often > be modelled mathematically, do you know of anyone who has attempted to > apply such fractal models to Internet traffic? There have been several studies presenting strong evidence that Internet traffic in general, and also that of some individual protocols (of particular interest: HTTP), have a fractal structure. This is still a major research area, though. One of the important unanswered questions is whether the fractal structure is a good model for behavior on short time scales (10-100 msec). Best guess (IMHO :-) is that it isn't. So there's a major question of how to put together a model that deals with both the short-term and long-term dynamics, along with major questions as to what's the *right* fractal model. Unfortunately, the math gets hairy fast, and the Internet is tremendously diverse. > When designing protocols > do researchers take this fractal nature into account? This also is a research frontier. Some work's been done though. One study that comes to mind is that by Sugih Jamin of USC (now at U Michigan) and colleagues, on the impact of fractal traffic on admission control schemes. I don't know of any protocols being designed with fractal traffic in mind. I'm right now in the middle of analyzing a bunch of end-to-end data to try to build up some sort of model of congestion time scales. One thing I'll be looking for is a link between the measurements and fractal models. I'm hoping to present some results at the first 1997 NANOG. Vern

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SNMP recording and browsing tool
by Mark A. Lovell 09 Oct '96

09 Oct '96

I'd like to announce the release of a new network analysis tool, the SNMP Vulture (http://www.vix.com/vulture) Vulture is a set of utilities to collect and store SNMP data and browse it in an interactive fashion (using any web browser). The result is a tool that can give you a good grasp of what a large network is doing. Here's a bit of the main man page: VULTURE(1) VULTURE VULTURE(1) NAME vulture - collect a round of snmp based on configuration files SYNOPSIS vulture [-dhv] DESCRIPTION Vulture collects SNMP data and stores it in a hierarchy of log files. It determines what data to collect based on a configuration file that in turn relies on a series of SNMP template files to determine which objects need to be col- lected for each entry in the configuration file. When invoked, vulture will collect a single set of data and store it in the log files. This is not very useful, and vulture is almost never invoked this way. This is usu- ally only necessary while debugging changes to configura- tion or template files. Vulture collects its data in a two pass operation where it first sizes up the tables involved, and then requests entire tables of relevant information. This is an effi- cient process, since it knows which objects it needs out of given tables, based on the information in it's template files. All data that can be directly matched against the net- work.desc file are placed into the regular log files. Data for interfaces that are not listed in the network.desc file are placed in a parallel set of discard log files. These data are usually discarded much earlier than regular data.

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RE: Internet II is coming...
by Sean Doran 09 Oct '96

09 Oct '96

| "IP Unter Alles", in other words, right? No, not at all. IP under computer-to-computer data. WRT your list, I don't think that either videoconferencing or connectivity to the PSTN is a particularly interesting thing to do with the Internet, in that I don't see either as being a fundamentally important Internet application. Both are features, and some kind of voice and video with what humans consider acceptable lag is kinda neat, particularly when considering things like sex-on-demand, but this is not what the Internet should be designed for, since it's not likely to be the majority traffic by revenue attractor. So, I think that having a parallel infrastructure for real-time traffic is reasonable right now, and my business sense tells me that such an infrastructure would be much more ripe for metered-use than any combination network, whether built on ATM or IP or both. MBONE people will tell you about the fact that videoconferencing works quite well on various IP internets and the Internet now, despite the fact that the MBONE is still fairly primitive in terms of a global multicast plant. CUSEEME works reasonably on cheap equipment and dialup lines, and seems to scale aesthetic response against money fairly well, despite the fact that it's also a fairly simple first-cut. Various people, including a Sprint Canada reseller, will tell you that ALGs exist that convert various voice-over-Internet things into signals that can be dealt with by PBXes and other telephony equipment. There are at least two SS7<->IP gateways in development with what appears to be short times-to-market ahead. One of these is being built along the lines of what PNO like an RBOC or a PTT or a cable company might want to deploy in their own facilities. These are neat hacks which will do fun things to international and national long-distance tariffs worldwide, in that you may suddenly have two QOSes for voice: one which is a side-effect of IP connectivity and which is of iffy-to-tolerable-to-good quality, and one which has metered, often distance-and-time-of-day- sensitive charging and a generally predicatably very-good-to-excellent quality. So, wrt your point 4 (connectivity to PSTN needs ATM), you are right that you can't do it just with Cisco equipment, but you can't do much else just with Cisco equipment, as I don't think they build SONET/SDH MUXes, CSU/DSUs, phone switches and the like anyway. Neither do the currently-popular ATM vendors, for that matter. Go figure. We're now down to 155Mbps medium speed to the desktop. I imagine that we can avoid arguing about the small details of cell tax and the like, and start looking at Gbps ethernet and other forthcoming LAN issues. They really are LAN issues; the Internet vs global ATM really isn't a factor here, nor is really IP vs ATM on a protocol-to-protocol basis. | Oh, and by the way, given that the local loop provider has OC-48 SONET | provisioned to this particular location, we could just as easily have | provisioned the connection to our backbone at OC12 as opposed to OC3. Did | I miss the Cisco announcement of an OC12 IP-SONET card? You may wish to discuss an NDA presentation on the forthcoming generation of routers from each of Cisco, Juniper and Bay Networks. Nothing on the router market now really handles OC12 as a medium rate, whether we're talking POS or ATM or anything else. OC12 is too slow anyway, frankly. | [ATM] | does have some undeniable advantages, and one of them is its ability to | carry voice traffic independent of IP traffic, and to connect in a | reasonably straightforward manner to the PSTN. Would you prefer to have | voice traffic clogging up the IP backbone?? Well, the infrastructure telcos use now, whether based on SONET or on plesiosynchronous stuff, separates PSTN and IP and X25 and Frame Relay and even ATM and so on and so forth. I expect this to continue. The only argument in favour of using ATM rather than TDMish stuff really comes from the mystical promise of ABR, which, so far, doesn't seem to work well when mixing certain traffic loads together, notably enormously-aggregated TCP and anything bursty. If, however, a sizeable amount of dead space really could be recovered from various parallel networks, thus freeing up more bandwidth along fibre paths, I'm all for that. The problem is that this doesn't really work well just yet, and I'm disinclined to believe that it's likely to work well with big-I Internet traffic ever, thanks to its rather fractal nature. So, just to clarify things, I don't discount ATM as a technology entirely, I just think that its time as something between IP and SONET for big-I Internet applications (other than *maybe* for customer aggregation and the like), is ticking away... Sean.

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