[48840] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: remember the "diameter of the internet"?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (brett watson)
Tue Jun 18 15:23:05 2002
Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2002 12:09:46 -0700
From: brett watson <brett@the-watsons.org>
Reply-To: brett watson <brett@the-watsons.org>
To: "nanog@merit.edu" <nanog@merit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0206181145160.5316-100000@arch.exigengroup.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
--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
