On Thu, 6 Oct 2005, Steven Champeon wrote:
on Thu, Oct 06, 2005 at 03:25:54PM -0500, John Kristoff wrote:
On Thu, 6 Oct 2005 11:54:34 +0100 Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com wrote:
While I realize that the "nuke survivable" thing is probably an old wives tale, it seems ridiculous that "the Internet" can't adjust by [...] It's not a myth. If the Internet were running RIP instead of BGP
For the Internet, I believe it was indeed a myth. I wasn't there, but according to someone who was:
<http://www.postel.org/pipermail/end2end-interest/2004-April/003940.html>
I believe the mental->mythical sequence went something like:
- some people (Paul Baran among them) were interested in ways to build communications networks that could survive lots of damage, and came up with the idea of distributed networks that could route through multiple redundant nodes
Read the paper here: http://www.rand.org/publications/RM/baran.list.html Redundant is probably the wrong word, failure-tolerant is probably more accurate.
- the US was in a cold war and nuclear arms race
- a nuclear attack could inflict lots of damage to communications networks
- the Internet was eventually, to some extent, built as a distributed network with routing through multiple redundant nodes (if nothing else, the protocols that ran it were capable of such)
- the Internet was therefore built to survive a nuclear attack
Roughly modeled after something designed to continue to route packets following the loss of a few nodes.
QED, HTH, HAND
-- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joel Jaeggli Unix Consulting joelja@darkwing.uoregon.edu GPG Key Fingerprint: 5C6E 0104 BAF0 40B0 5BD3 C38B F000 35AB B67F 56B2