North American Network Operators Group
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RE: What Worked - What Didn't

  • From: Iljitsch van Beijnum
  • Date: Mon Sep 17 17:17:17 2001 
On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Randy Bush wrote:

> > The big winners were cable TV, email, packet networks and IM applications.
> > The big losers with cell phones, circuit switching, PSTN, non-akamized
> > news sites.

> no one went after the comms infrastructure.  when they do, i suspect that
> we will find the internet is extremely vulnerable.

"Extremely" may be too strong, but certainly "much more than we want". We
multihome in The Netherlands and both our transit ISPs connect to the US
in the Washington/New York area, with no real backup.

I've heard some telcos talk about networks that span the globe, but as far
as I can tell, nearly all traffic from Europe to Africa, Asia/Pacific and
South America goes through the US. So apparently the cables are there but
they aren't used. And even for the US West Coast satellite is a reasonable
alternative with just 50% longer RTTs than sea/land based connections.

> how many folk even have md5 auth turned on their bgp peering sessions?

How much kerosine can MD5 withstand exactly?

But speaking of BGP: what concerns me is the very long timeouts. When a
BGP router loses power, it takes minutes for the peer on the other side of
the connection to notice something is wrong and reroute the traffic. In
the mean time, a lot of traffic has been lost, even though there could
have been an alternative path available all along. Fortunately, the power
down at 25 Broadway was a controlled one so we didn't have this problem
last week.