--On Tuesday, June 18, 2002 11:52 AM -0700 Vadim Antonov <avg@exigengroup.com> wrote:
Er... back then it took 2 months to learn everything a backbone engineer had to know. Nowadays it's an alphabet soup of stupid techniques to achieve the same result - i.e. to deliver a packet from place A to place B. Blame greeeeedy vendors (OFRV, particularly, and don't forget hellcore) who sell FUD instead of making their products easy to use. Given their dominant position on the market, everyone else has to be "compatible" with the zillion little features just to stay afloat.
that's an interesting point of view. i would say that really nothing at all has changed in 10 years. sure, there is a bag-of-stupid-ip-tricks to choose from that didn't exist back then but none of the tricks have solved our problems. the political/financial issues crept in, and the bag-of-stupid-ip-tricks seems to have developed as a way to solve those issues, which they have not solved. the same level of fundamental knowledge required back then applies today, and many network and systems engineers are *still* lacking that knowledge. i suppose your are right if you're implying that the bag-of-stupid-ip-tricks has obfuscated what's really important. uucp and modems are looking pretty attractive to me again.
Regarding the diameter of the Internet - I'm still trying to figure out why the hell anyone would want to have "edge" routers (instead of dumb TDMs) if not for inability of IOS to support large numbers of virtual interfaces. Same story goes for "clusters" of backbone routers.
everyone note: vadim threw that can of worms, it wasn't me! -b