[30329] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Internet FUD Abound
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Scott Marcus)
Wed Jul 26 19:35:53 2000
Message-Id: <3.0.5.32.20000726193046.0085dca0@pobox3.genuity.com>
Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2000 19:30:46 -0400
To: nanog@merit.edu
From: Scott Marcus <smarcus@genuity.com>
In-Reply-To: <397F634F.5525B3EA@marconi.com>
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At 18:16 07/26/2000 -0400, David Charlap wrote:
>Sean Donelan wrote:
>> The Reuters article skips over some of the important qualifiers
>> in the Nature letter. Read the entire letter on the Nature
>> website. http://www.nature.com/
>>
>> The conclusions are interesting, but I think missing a few pieces
>> of data. Every major public NAP has had service affecting incidents,
>> and so far we have not seen the partioning effect Albert et al write
>> about.
I agree with Sean that the article itself is an interesting read. In fact,
I'd say it's better than I expected based on the Reuters report. A key
conclusion -- that elimination of a random 2.5% of the routers of the
Internet would cause little harm, but elimination of the most central 2.5%
of the routers would at least triple the diameter of the network -- is
likely correct. (Although I don't think we needed fancy mathematics to
tell us that. ;^)
Sean, I don't think that they were arguing that EVERY failure would cause
this kind of collapse. They were saying that a scale-free system might be
particularly vulnerable to a systematic attempt to cripple its most
critical elements. A failure of a single public NAP is probably well below
that threshhold.
> ... and David Charlap wrote:
>Note also that the graph they examine is one of web pages linked to each
>other. Not the underlying network of fibers and routers...
Perhaps you read this too hastily? They appear to have evaluated both.
Cheers,
- Scott
