North American Network Operators Group

Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: on the issue of proxy-caching and new technologies

  • From: Douglas Denault
  • Date: Tue Jun 30 10:59:41 1998

Hi Alan:

You have moved me to subscribe as a "posting" subscriber

Alan Hannan wrote:
> 
>   I've just read through the 20 or so email messages in the thread
>   regarding the use of proxy-cache traffic on http traffic.

check the archives whenever they are post, I'll bet 100 is closer

>   I believe DIGEX should be congratulated on their forward exploration
>   of technology.  Their creative solutions to problems like this are the
>   spirit that will sustain the Internet.
> 
>   DWDM and huge fiber builds will get us part of the way to handling
>   internet growth, but we need to find ways to utilize upper-layer
>   tweaks to do more with less.
> 
>   -alan

So much for fun. First I am a DIGEX customer (one of the ones mentioned
in the posting on the related threads). A couple of points:

Business/Contractual/Legal

    1) DIGEX brought a lot of resources when they were convinced there
was a problem.
       I discovered this over the weekend and it was fixed by Monday
afternoon

    2) The notification sent out was at best ambiguous. My partner
recognized 
       what they were saying and questioned them on it. They (DIGEX)
thought 
       our situation was covered (testing??).

    3) Clearly my class of service has been changed without any
notification.

Technical Issues
 
    1) As has been pointed out, the clear beneficiary of this changed is
DIGEX. As a 
       non-believer in hit counts, that part of the discussion has been
educational.
       But I think its clear this was done with the hope of increasing
backbone 
       throughput.

    2) We are the guys with the obsolete proxy (netscape 1.12). Guess
what?? It does
       what we need, and DIGEX was fully aware we were using it before
turning on the
       cache. No testing here. So whoever made the point that they were
just letting
       problems fall out from operational glitches was pretty close.

    3) There are clearly experts posting to this thread that think the
gain will be
       marginal and/or there are other ways of accomplishing this goal
without the
       customer impact attendant with this solution.

I believe <ANTIFLAME> that most of the emails addressing these and
related issues dealt with the validity of doing this with or without
notification. </ANTIFLAME> I do not see how the issues above or the bulk
of these threads relate to using a new and creative solution.

To add one more amen to the chorus of many, I would be much happier
congratulating DIGEX on new and creative solutions if they would let
their customers know what changes are being made and perhaps even test
them a bit better.

Doug Denault
Safeport Network Services