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RE: NANOG
by avg＠postman.ncube.com 02 Apr '96

02 Apr '96

Bob Metcalfe wrote: >Note, I have never predicted "the death of the Internet," only catastrophic >collapse(s) during 1996, which is "a good calibration" of the rest of your >objections (below). One does not need to be Nostradamus to predict that s*t happens. It happened in the past, many times, too. Like when me and Sean installed a just-baked SSE into a DC box and it looked fine but screwed nearly all connectivity to Europe for few hours when we were trying to figure out what was going on. Or when FIX-E<->ICM-DC Bell Atlantic's DS-3 was flapping like mad when moon was in the wrong phase and BA did nothing to fix it for months. Or when some sequence of 1s and 0s was triggering some bulls*t alarms in Sprint fiber network so causing shutdowns on the entire OC-24 trunk. Or when a bogus static route in a Sprint's box was causing ANS's version of gated to go banana and drop BGP sessions. Or many many more occasions when "Bysantine-mode failure" becomes ugly reality in the middle of the night so causing more than few people to be dragged out of beds. As long as Internet technology is freaking bleeding edge and operators are in the "code of the day" club catastrophes are bound to happen. >Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, the problem is not that the Internet's chief 100 >engineers, whoever they are, fail to report their problems to me, it's that >they (you?) fail to report them to anybody, including to each other, which >is half our problem. That is simply not true. The backbone engineering society is tightly knit and quite often backbone engineers are simply personal friends. I certainly never had a problem with people refusing to fix problems within their domains (well, PSI's TWD is not an operational problem). The organization-level corrdination is often broken at operators level, but that is merely a function of severe shortage of qualified personnel and inadequate compensation for the high-stress job. >Settlements, "wrong on the face?" Or are you just too busy busy busy >defensive to argue? Before you talk of settlements answer the simple question -- a packet travelled from provider A to provider B. Who should pay to whom? Then, please, stop perpetuating nonsense. >So, you say, increasing Internet diameters (hops) are only of concern to >whiners like me? There are no whiners LIKE me. I am THE whiner. And hops >ARE a first class problem, Jerry, or are you clueless about how >store-and-forward packet switching actually really works? I was in a backbone engineer's skin for quite a few years, and "hops" per se never were a problem. In fact, store-and-forward delays are a mere fraction of wire propagation delays -- do a traceroute coast-to-coast, look at delays and calculate how it relates to distance divided by speed of light. Indeed, you're the first person concerned with the growth of diameter (which is, BTW, logarithmic to size of the network). --vadim

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Metcalfe's clue density...
by mo＠uunet.uu.net 02 Apr '96

02 Apr '96

the fact that he attributes the IEPG as an ISOC organization is a good calibration on everything else. just remember: "Imminent death of net predicted" ::= end of discussion soooo sorry. thanks for playing. good night. -mo

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Re: NANOG/IEPG/ISOC's current role
by rboivie＠vnet.IBM.COM 01 Apr '96

01 Apr '96

Gordon, Small point. The NSFnet backbone service ended on April 30, 1995 (not '94). Rick Boivie rboivie(a)vnet.ibm.com > commercial internet matured and the federal gov't withdrew. Last traffic > reports march 1994!? Of course! This was the month before the last > gov't funded backbone (NSFnet) was turned off. Since then the traffic > statistics have been the **proprietary** possessions of Sprint, MCI, > UUNET, ANS, etc.

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NANOG/IEPG/ISOC's current role
by Michael Dillon 01 Apr '96

01 Apr '96

Have a look at Bob Metcalfe's Infoworld column this week at http://www.infoworld.com/pageone/opinions/metcalfe.htm in which he discusses the shortcomings of NANOG, IEPG and ISOC in not taking a more aggressive role in managing the operations of the Internet. Michael Dillon Voice: +1-604-546-8022 Memra Software Inc. Fax: +1-604-546-3049 http://www.memra.com E-mail: michael(a)memra.com

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Re: Sprint Peering Requirements? WAS More network problems
by Donna McCole 01 Apr '96

01 Apr '96

Ackk, I have embarrased myself! The excellent first hand account of the incident at the wiltel pop was by Matt Petach. I enjoyed it so much that i forwarded it and, shame on me, overlooked the cc to the list. My apologies to all. All Credit to Matt. donna At 09:30 AM 03/31/96 -0500, you wrote: > >Donna, > >Your description of the events surrounding the 'much discussed' >outage was excellent. >

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Re: Sprint Peering Requirements? WAS More network problems (fwd)
by Donna McCole 31 Mar '96

31 Mar '96

Recently, Paul Vixie wrote... > > > P.S. what is the deal with the Santa Clara POP anyway? I've seen gas > > main explosions, circuits cut by a blowtorch (gee? maybe they're related), > > "missing" fiber, "lost" circuits, and other shenangans. > > The story may be growing with the telling, but I was told that a gas main > ruptured, with or without a small explosion (depends on who you ask), and > the fire marshall came in, smelled natural fumes all over, and ordered that > power be cut to the surrounding buildings, presumably to prevent explosions > due to sparks and such. WilTel ultimately brought in a portable generator > and put this wonderful new spark generator out in the parking lot, closer > to the natural gas fumes than anything inside the building would have been. *sigh* I'd kinda hoped the issue would die down, but since it won't, I guess I'll actually speak up. I was driving to work, running a bit late at around 11:10 am, and turned west on Walsh Avenue from San Tomas. I pulled into the left turn lane leading into the business park, and noticed the driveway was blocked with orange cones and a backhoe digging. A woman in a dark, Pennsylvania green lincoln towncar pulled up into the left turn lane behind me. When the left turn arrow turned green, I made a u-turn on Walsh, and entered the business park via a secondary driveway closer to San Tomas. I glanced in my rear-view mirror, and saw that the woman in the green car was stopped midway through the intersection, blocking oncoming traffic, waiting for the construction crew to move the cones to let her into the parking lot via that driveway; I guess she figured the earth rotated around her, so why shouldn't everyone else change to fit? So, as I pulled into the parking lot in front of work, I looked over at the entrance, and saw that the construction workers were attempting to be nice, and were moving the cones out of the way, and trying to back up the backhoe so she could go past, and stop blocking the traffic that was now getting very irate. :-) As the worker in the backhoe was pulling the bucket out of the hole, he must have hit the main, because there was a very loud "kawoosh" and a blast of white condesation headed skyward. The construction crew started running away from the hole, and I headed into work to alert my coworkers to the problem. One of my coworkers called PG&E while a second one called 911. PG&E immediately said they were dispatching a crew to the site, and also told us to begin shutting down any exterior equipment that was likely to cause sparks. By this time, the smell of natural gas was nearly overpowering outside, and was becoming more so indoors. We began shutting down all the air conditioners on the roof, and began prepping the site for evacuation. Within about 15 minutes, the fire dept. had arrived, as had PG&E, and began roping off the area, and had us evacuate the building. We used cellular phones to call back in, and changed the outgoing messages for the NOC and tech support ACD queues to alert customers that we had been evacuated, and could not currently come to the phones. :-) PG&E began working on isolating the section of pipe, but within 15 minutes of their arrival, a spark triggered a fireball that roasted the dump truck, the backhoe, the tree nearby, the signs, and pretty much everything else in the vicinity. The one good offshoot of the fireball was that the pipe was actually burning now, and sending flames ~75 feet in a nice vertical column; the fire dept. immediately pulled hoses into place, to keep the fire contained to the single jet, and the nice folks next door at Wiltel rolled out their 75kVa generator out the BACK of the building, which was approx 150 yards from the actual gas leak, and fired it up, since there wasn't much danger of an explosion now that there was a constant flame source burning off the gas as it emerged. Since we couldn't get to our cars, we walked to lunch, and answered pages from various customers who noticed that network connectivity was spotty or nonexistent to large areas, and explained the situation. We got back to work by about 2:30pm, the fire was still going, but PG&E was working on clamping off the pipe physically a few dozen yards upstream; once the pipe was crushed, and the fire out, it only took about an hour to get clearance from the incident commander to air out the building, get santa clara electric to restore power, reset the PDU, reset the UPS's, and by 3:30 full network connectivity through our network was restored. Hopefully this clarifies the situation from a firsthand witness, and keeps people from blaming Wiltel for sparks or any other such nonsense. > > This time I'm > > glad we followed WorldCom's (WilTel, whatevertheirnameisthisweek) site > > recommendation and used DC power for our equipment. But this POP is > > like working out of a telecommunications war zone. > > That's one of several good reasons why CIX has installed a router up in > Digital's Palo Alto facility (I'd call it a NAP, since it has rack space > for rent and GIGAswitches all over the place, but "NAP" seems to indicate > congressional funding so I'll choose another word... "Interconnect/CoLo" > (ICL)). In addition to having both AC and DC on UPS and a generator, Palo > Alto has actual coffee houses for those late night adventures. > Matt Petach

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Re: SONET Interconnect (was RE: MCI)
by Sean Doran 30 Mar '96

30 Mar '96

| Ok, NDA aside then, too. Assume you had to decide now. You go multi | DS3 and wait for new options because you do not need more than 2xDS3 | = OC3c + ATM? Would you go 3xDS3 and load share? Yes to the latter. When we were thinking about scale some time ago, Vadim sketched out a very reasonable proposal for a stacking network topology to build a 3xDS3 network immediately or incrementally. Router technology has changed to the degree that we could now do this fairly cheaply in comparison to any solution which offered comparable bandwidth in a unified form; the key additional costs would involve space for CSU/DSUs, and the extra slots to make up for the poor port density HIP cards give you. This compares favourably with the space requirements of ATM switching equipment, especially when factoring in other cost items such as configuration and maintenance. If building a network with a relatively small set of POPs and circuits that follow fibre paths, the trade off thus would be less space/power/heat/capital costs and more complexity and the ability to do sustained traffic flows at more than DS3. Packet forwarding technology changes in the 75xx architecture appear to have ameliorated the latter too. In networks with very different topologies, YMMV. I suppose the proper quip would be, "gee, wouldn't you have better luck talking with your vendor rather than your competitor?" (or even gee, ATM is neat, go for it!), but I'm in a helpful mood for some reason today. Sean.

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Re: SONET Interconnect (was RE: MCI)
by Sean Doran 30 Mar '96

30 Mar '96

| Ok, I will bite. Let's assume for a moment that dual DS3 is not | acceptible and I want IMUXed DS3s or a real optical interface. What do | you recommend for a Cisco? I would recommend talking to your sales representative about getting an NDA presentation. | ATM has the annoying advantage of having alot of people building for it. Gee, there are lots of OSI vendors too. Go for it. You can leverage the fun stuff done by CDNNET. :-) Sean.

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Re: SONET Interconnect (was RE: MCI)
by Paul Ferguson 30 Mar '96

30 Mar '96

At 12:36 AM 3/29/96 -0500, Shikhar Bajaj wrote: > >Several of our clients seriously consider >ATM/SONET the best way to go because they feel that a switched >technology like ATM is the best single technology (currently) >to offer them high speed and support for multiple applications (like >video and voice, as well as data). They are not just sending around >200-byte IP packets. Furthermore, the ability to get >quality of service support and guarantees is important them. They don't >think that RSVP, when it comes, will be enough. Finally, >to them, the economics makes sense. They understand the limitations >(i.e. overheads) and believe that they are acceptable. > What you fail to mention, however, is that in an effort to achieve these noble goals across the Internet, you are relegated to using IP over ATM. This is the fatal flaw. Sorry. I remain unconvinced. Unless you begin building massive [native] long-haul ATM networks, this is not an acceptable transport for the reasons I mentioned earlier. - paul

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Re: SONET Interconnect (was RE: MCI)
by Sean Doran 30 Mar '96

30 Mar '96

| Doesn't the fact that they recover the investment mean that enough | people wanted the product and were willing to pay for it? Well, I dunno, it could also mean that an organization with enormously successful marketing skills was able to make hay out of an alternative that makes heedless yompers pay excessively for often really unsuitable machinery. No? Sean. (looking for better suggestions for a 'y' word)

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