Has anyone heard of E.E. Times that did a piece on the Internet and blamed Cisco routers for all the bottlenecks? They quote www.ra.net/statistics and www.academ.com/nanog as well as Craig Lebowitz and Fred Baker. I have a locally translated copy but I would be interested in seeing the original.
It's on their web site if you wanna dig for it. A very sad article...
The URL is http://www.techweb.com/se/directlink.cgi?EET19970106S0051. The first paragraph really sets the tone for the rest of the article: : A report by a federally funded networking research group here suggests : that severe Internet congestion might be linked to "routing instability," : wherein heavy traffic emanating from routers bogs down the public network. : The researchers further claim to have turned up evidence that Internet : autonomous systems supplied by the dominant maker of routers, Cisco : Systems Inc., have inherent router flaws that may exacerbate the problem. The comment at the end is pretty good, too: : Cisco routers might have IP-compatibility problems These people ought to stick to roads and bridges. Nick
The EE Times writer stumbled across the May/June BoardWatch article that somehow warped the May NANOG discussions on routing stability into a story on "Cisco's dirty little secret." The EE Times author apparently thought this would make a great basis for a vendor-bashing story, so he gave both Merit and Cisco a call. Both Cisco and the RA tried to carefully (and at great length) explain to the EE Times writer the same things discussed at NANOG. Particularly, we (Merit) tried to emphasize that we were/are not finger-pointing at Cisco, nor any other single vendor/ISP. Basically, the content of the discussion was: * there are an awful lot of withdraw/announcements out there * we don't know were they are comming from, and no, it is not Cisco's fault * some valid, and standards-compliant vendor implementation decisions are contributing a small fraction of extra withdraws (yes, Cisco is one of these vendors, but there are probably others) * there are differing opinions on how much of a problem all of this extra withdraws pose for Internet * even though it is not clear there was/is a significant problem, vendors (Cisco) have created fixes to limit some of the extraneous routing information * a recently noticed 30-second periodicity to updates tends to suggest a systematic problem in the infrastructure. This 30 second periodicity occurs with both widthraws and announcements (and seems independent of the extra withdraw problem). This problem may be a widespread problem with: data collection errors, leased lines (DSU/CSU), common configuration errors, bugs in router software, and even self-synchronization problems or base, theoretical problems in the routing protocols themselves. At the end of this discussion, I felt somewhat comfortable that the author understood the issues. I was disappointed, and a bit discouraged to see the resulting article. Unfortunately, this article seems to be one of the more widely-read pieces on routing stability. Cisco and Merit even received calls from the NY Times and Washington Post about it. But after explaining the issues, the Times/Post reporters correctly decided that there was not a good -- and certainly not a "Cisco is at fault" -- story in the issues -- only a complicated, poorly understood problem. -- Craig Some pointers: A discussion of the BoardWatch article http://www.ispc.org/news/news003.html Routing statistics/analysis http://www.merit.edu/ipma/analysis NANOG home page (with pointers to the meeting notes) http://www.nanog.org at Mon, 13 Jan 1997 12:57:58 GMT, you wrote:
Has anyone heard of E.E. Times that did a piece on the Internet and blame d Cisco routers for all the bottlenecks? They quote www.ra.net/statistics and www.academ.com/nanog as well as Craig Lebowitz and Fred Baker. I have a locally translated copy but I would be interested in seeing the original.
It's on their web site if you wanna dig for it. A very sad article...
The URL is http://www.techweb.com/se/directlink.cgi?EET19970106S0051.
The first paragraph really sets the tone for the rest of the article:
: A report by a federally funded networking research group here suggests : that severe Internet congestion might be linked to "routing instability," : wherein heavy traffic emanating from routers bogs down the public network. : The researchers further claim to have turned up evidence that Internet : autonomous systems supplied by the dominant maker of routers, Cisco : Systems Inc., have inherent router flaws that may exacerbate the problem.
The comment at the end is pretty good, too:
: Cisco routers might have IP-compatibility problems
These people ought to stick to roads and bridges.
Nick
-- Craig Labovitz labovit@merit.edu Merit Network, Inc. (313) 764-0252 (office) 4251 Plymouth Road, Suite C. (313) 747-3745 (fax) Ann Arbor, MI 48105-2785
The EE Times writer stumbled across the May/June BoardWatch article that somehow warped the May NANOG discussions on routing stability into a story on "Cisco's dirty little secret." The EE Times author apparently thought this would make a great basis for a vendor-bashing story, so he gave both Merit and Cisco a call.
Both Cisco and the RA tried to carefully (and at great length) explain to the EE Times writer the same things discussed at NANOG.
He called others, namely me. Having had many bad experiences with the yellow press on a mission, I did not go on at great length. When called by a panther, don't anther. - Ogden Nash randy
On Mon, 13 Jan 1997, Craig Labovitz wrote:
The EE Times writer stumbled across the May/June BoardWatch article that
September actually. http://www.boardwatch.com/mag/96/sept/bwm17.htm And I wrote a rebuttal that was posted to 4 or 5 ISP mailing lists http://www.ispc.org/news/news003.html I've written a complaint to the EETimes editors regarding this and referring them to both URL's above. In my opinion the article is plagiarism, stupid and not even news. Michael Dillon - Internet & ISP Consulting Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-604-546-3049 http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com
participants (4)
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Craig Labovitz -
Michael Dillon -
Nick Hilliard -
randy＠psg.com