[85288] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Nuclear survivability (was: Cogent/Level 3 depeering)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com)
Fri Oct 7 05:13:24 2005
In-Reply-To: <20051006202554.6113F136C82@aharp.ittns.northwestern.edu>
To: nanog@nanog.org
From: Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com
Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2005 10:14:14 +0100
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
> > > 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>
We'll probably never resolve this question entirely,
but a simple internetwork (partial mesh, not too big)
running RIP does seem to be able to survive in the face
of multiple failures. Presumably, the network view of
a nuclear war would be multiple failures.
In any case, I think that you have to go further back
to find the roots of this story. Paul Baran came up
with the basic ideas of packet-switching and partial
mesh networks which are the foundation of the Internet.
There is a nice explanation of this on his bio page here:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/baran.html
I think Dave Reed should have just said to the reporter
that the Internet survived 9/11 so well because it was
largely a non-centralized network that does not depend
on any kind of central traffic control. It's like a road
network where every driver(packet) is free to detour around
obstructions.
Remember the information highway?
--Michael Dillon
