HWB - You make some very important points through your frustration, the most key of which is this one: "...if someone points a finger at your competitor, don't be too happy about it. You may be next". Unfortunately with the available technology and labour pool, there is no entity which could provide a very clean global Internet, period. There is no organization you can pay more money to that will improve your general-case performance, unless your general-case utilization is really much more like a VPN than the Internet. That is to say, if what you're looking for is high performance to sites X, Y and Z, and OK current-Internet performance to everywhere else, there are several options open to you, one of which is putting X, Y, and Z on a VPN and hooking each of these sites individually to the Internet. This is something that Sprint Managed Router Networks does all the time and is very good at, and is essentially what (modulo policy) the vBNS is for. However, with respect to the Internet, anybody who tells you that they can provide a better quality of service, connectivity-wise, than their equivalent competitors is either lying or in for a really big shock. As to your other points, I'm not sure how to address them, but I think you probably have some ideas you'd be willing to share... :) Sean.
Sean: I would wish that at least the major service providers would meet in some smoke filled room and get to a fate sharing mindset and conclude "we will fix the joint problem." I have heard there are some rooms available now at WPAFB? Right next to all the archived UFOs? A good part of the problem is a questionable mindset in a rather young commercial environment. There is no Fed daddy any more, and I suspect that you would not want one either. So, who is driving a global collaboration? Has to be you and your pals. I do not see another choice. Neither the Feds, not the IETF, ISoc, whoever, will fix it for you. And NANOG is waaayyyys to weak and can't quite get things together itself. I routinely see high packet losses, the environment, from what I see, has severely degraded to what it was, say, a year ago. I submit it also has significantly grown and we have many more cooks in the kitchen, but, as ill as they are defined, we cannot even keep our old standards up. I still believe y'all got the Internet on a silver plate, and just need to fix things up. I suspect at least 80% of the problem is non-technical, but abministrative and mindset. If those 80% could be resolved to a somewhat high degree, I suspect we will find solutions for the technical problems. Not over night, I am sure, but something we could plan for. Unfortunately, the problem is too big to be resolved solely by the engineers. Takes more than just intelligence.
In message <199511221908.LAA15917@upeksa.sdsc.edu>, Hans-Werner Braun writes:
[ .. discussion of smoke filled rooms and UFOs deleted. ;-) ]
I routinely see high packet losses, the environment, from what I see, has severely degraded to what it was, say, a year ago. I submit it also has significantly grown and we have many more cooks in the kitchen, but, as ill as they are defined, we cannot even keep our old standards up. I still believe y'all got the Internet on a silver plate, and just need to fix things up.
I suspect at least 80% of the problem is non-technical, but abministrative and mindset. If those 80% could be resolved to a somewhat high degree, I suspect we will find solutions for the technical problems. Not over night, I am sure, but something we could plan for.
One requirement that we have been pushing hard for is: Zero packet loss to stable destinations if the path is uncongested in the presence of arbitrarily high levels of route flap. We are trying to enforce this by requiring router vendors to report the highest traffic rates that they can sustain where this holds true. We completely ignore the Bradner test results and enphatically insist that those tests are completely useless and have done the Internet a great disservice. This zero loss condition would seem to the naive Internet user to be a given. It absolutely is not (unless your router is an NSS :). If you have a cache of prefixes and can forward really fast with that cache and have a much slower secondary means of forwarding, you had better not invalidate any cache entries by flushing subsets of cache entries (or worse yet the whole cache) and you had better not insure cache consistency by timing out cache entries. The cache problems are particularly difficult when trying to maintain overlaps and componets of the overlap or the aggregate flap. Route deletion is a hard problem with a partially populated cache. Router vendors seemd to have overlooked this difficulty and/or not been acutely aware of the requirement. Unless this is fixed, you will get loss between two stable points even if there is no congestion since high levels of route flap is sort of a given now that the Internet has become this big. Of course, things get much worse if links in the path are congested, or if routers can't handle the PPS load, or if routers in the path fall over and die. I'm just pointing out that for some routers, when things are "working" they are not working by your definition or mine. And - Yes, it is being fixed!
Unfortunately, the problem is too big to be resolved solely by the engineers. Takes more than just intelligence.
Wow! Sound real complicated. Must require beaurocrats. ;-) Curtis
participants (3)
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Curtis Villamizar -
hwb＠upeksa.sdsc.edu -
Sean Doran