[5490] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Ungodly packet loss rates
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Edward Vielmetti)
Mon Oct 21 18:21:23 1996
Date: Mon, 21 Oct 1996 17:36:48 -0400 (EDT)
From: Edward Vielmetti <emv@nsb.fv.com>
To: jbash@velvet.com
cc: nanog@merit.net
In-Reply-To: <96Oct21.131604-0700pdt.18972-4+4@blue.velvet.com>
On Mon, 21 Oct 1996 jbash@velvet.com wrote:
> A situation where I have to "shop around" for connectivity depending
> on what site I want to talk to that day is just plain unacceptable.
If you're like most people working off site, there are a few hosts that
you need to keep long TCP sessions open to, and the rest of the net that
gets random traffic.
> It doesn't look to me as though the loss is being introduced at the
> NAPS. If you look at the trace, you'll see that significant loss
> starts to appear within Alternet, well after MAE-west.
Traceroute is less useful a tool than you think in the face of congestive
loss. Routers can and do selectively prioritize the queueing packets
based on their type, and if I were a network operator I would have no
hesitation about dropping traceroute or ping packets to low priority.
> If I did interactive work under these conditions on a regular basis, I'd
> have gone insane long ago.
No, you would have changed ISPs a long time ago, instead of whining to
NANOG that the entire world is providing sub-standard service.
Ed
