[895] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: internet consumer reports on state-wide IP networks
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Edward Vielmetti)
Wed Jul 3 05:02:13 1991
To: Craig Partridge <craig@sics.se>
Cc: com-priv@uu.psi.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of Wed, 03 Jul 91 08:52:18 +0200.
Date: Wed, 03 Jul 91 05:01:06 EDT
From: Edward Vielmetti <emv@ox.com>
> I'd suggest you be a bit more clear about what you are using to judge
> and why.
Naturally. The Consumer Reports process goes into great details about
their testing process, where they got their samples, how much variance
there was et al. You get pictures, diagrams, charts. It's a reasonably
thorough evaluation, but they defer to some sensory judgements of their
expert peanut-butter testers along the way.
To take the example that set you off, maps.
Various people at various times have set about to collect maps of the
internet. This is an arbitrarily hard problem, since just like Rand
McNally you need to track tens of thousands of changes a year. A well
done map is useful to NOC operations staff; a poorly done map is just
puffery, or worse yet dishonest and misleading (the NSFNET T3 "cloud"
leaps to mind). Let me give you an example of a good map: the ones in
ftp.oar.net:/pub/maps/maps.tar.Z. This is a set of maps that are
obviously there for the OARnet NOC; they include detailed information
on addresses of systems, interface numbers and names, topology,
connections to external networks etc. A document like that one gives
me some amount of confidence that the people who designed and who run
the network know what's out there and are able to manage it.
These are "maps as engineering documents". There's also "maps as
resource discovery aids", "maps as network diagnostic tools" etc etc.
If the net is ever going to be easy enough to use as the Interstate
Highway System, there's gotta be good maps. So if a state network
wants to offer me a good quality service, they need to provide good
roadmaps. (Like the ones we used to pick up with Jim and Paula on the
back, until Jim and Paula split up and it was Jim and Janet. Always
ask for them at the bridge.)
--Ed
