At 11:31 6/21/96, Bob Metcalfe wrote:
... A few of you missed one point at least. I am NOT suggesting that any of YOU start wearing suits, especially if you find them uncomfortable, or that they make a statement you are not willing to make -- none of that, no -- good engineers are too valuable to overdress. I am suggesting that more of the kind of people who ALREADY wear suits should start paying attention to the important work NANOG is attempting and start attending your meetings so they can pitch in on the non-engineering aspects of operating the Internet. Is that clearer now?
Bob, I believe that you'll find quite a few folks "concerned with the non-engineering aspects of operating the Internet" amongst the attendee list of each NANOG and IEPG meeting. There is a great deal of activity in trying to scale the current Internet, but it doesn't always happen via the group presentations. One of the disadvantages of the decentralized nature of the Internet is that different organizations have different views on the best way to move forward; I'm not certain that a more centralized model can respond to change as quickly as we've accomplished to date. Are there particular issues that you think should be addressed at NANOG and/or IEPG? Both organizations have a fairly open policy with respect to agenda items and I imagine that your suggestions would be most welcome.
By the way, there are reports from two days ago that 400,000 people lost their Internet access for 13 hours. Sounds like an outage approaching "collapse."
An interesting characterization... you'd definitely need to talk to NETCOM to determine if it was a "collapse" as opposed to a "serious event" or just a "typical failure mode".
Was that just a Netcom thing that NANOG has no interest in? Netcom is not talking very much about what happened. Any clues/facts out there? Were any NAPs involved?
Again, NETCOM would be the authoritative source for such info... Reuter's June 19th coverage noted that the problem was related to a problem with a routine change to the "routing table". I will note that operating a large Internet backbone requires availability of staff with very specialized skills in both Internet routing and high-speed networking, and all Internet service providers face quite a challenge in maintaining such staff. This is a risk factor to Internet growth and stablility that receives little attention but nevertheless is quite real. /John p.s. Bob - It's possible that not all NANOG folks have a strong interest in this thread; have you considering creating a mailing list to host a discussion on the Internet's "imminent collapse"?