On Tue, 2 Apr 1996, Bob Metcalfe wrote:
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.
This is a good point. If there were a list somewhere which collated all of the trouble reports from all of the ISP's then some entrepreneur could set up an Internet traffic report WWW site and make all the mass of trouble reports palatable for end users, including stories about ladies in Lincolns. This entrepreneur could get rich selling ads on their WWW site and everyone would know what is going on.
Now, NANOG -- not affiliated with anybody, you say, not even the Internet Society. OK, I stand corrected. So, if not ISOC, who are IEPG and NANOG? Do IEPG and NANOG have anything to do with one another? By the way, is IETF not ISOC too? See www.isoc.org.
Even though I know how all this came about and how groups like NANOG operate (what group!) I still don't believe it when people say that NANOG doesn't set policy and NANOG is not affiliated with anybody. The fact is that NANOG appears to set policy and NANOG appears to be affiliated with somebody and that appearance is what counts until NANOG pipes up and states what their official policy and official affiliations are.
Settlements, "wrong on the face?" Or are you just too busy busy busy defensive to argue?
Settlements are contrary to NANOG policy. It is also contrary to NANOG policy to engage in long drawn out debates about things which have already been decided, like "settlements are wrong". The policy is unwritten and to a certain extent, non-verbal, but it is policy nevertheless.
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 have had to explain to ISP's how to do email relaying so that their customers can get email back and forth from fringe locations. It's usually an asymmetrical problem so it shows up when a person can receive email but cannot send a reply. BTW, the trick is to address it like this joe%farawayplace.com@majorhub.com Michael Dillon Voice: +1-604-546-8022 Memra Software Inc. Fax: +1-604-546-3049 http://www.memra.com E-mail: michael@memra.com