[85265] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Nuclear survivability (was: Cogent/Level 3 depeering)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Joel Jaeggli)
Thu Oct 6 17:39:29 2005
Date: Thu, 6 Oct 2005 14:38:33 -0700 (PDT)
From: Joel Jaeggli <joelja@darkwing.uoregon.edu>
To: Steven Champeon <schampeo@hesketh.com>
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <20051006210733.GA15118@hesketh.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
On Thu, 6 Oct 2005, Steven Champeon wrote:
>
> on Thu, Oct 06, 2005 at 03:25:54PM -0500, John Kristoff wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, 6 Oct 2005 11:54:34 +0100
>> Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com wrote:
>>
>>>> While I realize that the "nuke survivable" thing is probably an old
>>>> wives tale, it seems ridiculous that "the Internet" can't adjust by
>> [...]
>>> It's not a myth. If the Internet were running RIP instead of BGP
>>
>> For the Internet, I believe it was indeed a myth. I wasn't there,
>> but according to someone who was:
>>
>> <http://www.postel.org/pipermail/end2end-interest/2004-April/003940.html>
>
> I believe the mental->mythical sequence went something like:
>
> - some people (Paul Baran among them) were interested in ways to build
> communications networks that could survive lots of damage, and came
> up with the idea of distributed networks that could route through
> multiple redundant nodes
Read the paper here:
http://www.rand.org/publications/RM/baran.list.html
Redundant is probably the wrong word, failure-tolerant is probably more
accurate.
> - the US was in a cold war and nuclear arms race
>
> - a nuclear attack could inflict lots of damage to communications
> networks
>
> - the Internet was eventually, to some extent, built as a distributed
> network with routing through multiple redundant nodes (if nothing
> else, the protocols that ran it were capable of such)
>
>
> - the Internet was therefore built to survive a nuclear attack
Roughly modeled after something designed to continue to route packets
following the loss of a few nodes.
> QED, HTH, HAND
>
>
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