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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: How worried is too worried? Plus, a Global Crossing Story.
It sounds like time for an explanation of what Digital Island is. I'm sure marketing will be upset with me for dropping the official "corporate positioning" language, but here goes: There are multiple pieces to Digital Island, the two biggest being an Internet backbone network (mostly carrying web hosting traffic) and a content delivery network (it competes with Akamai, which many of you are probably more familiar with). I work in the hosting side of the company, and have considerably less knowledge of the content delivery network, so I won't promise to be entirely accurate here. The packets you're seeing come from the content delivery network. Content delivery networks consist of caching web servers spread out around the world. When a user requests web content cached by the CDN, a DNS request is sent looking up the caching server. The CDN then calculates which caching server is closest to the requester (or more specifically, the DNS server the requester is using), and sends back the IP address of the closest caching server. The user's web browser then contacts the local caching server, and does the download from there. My knowledge of how exactly those measurements are done is a bit hazy, and Jason is certainly a better person to answer that than I am. However, the ICMP echo requests you're seeing are at least part of the process, and aren't being done unless your users are requesting content from our CDN. They aren't being done at random, and aren't being done as part of a research project. They're just being done to send you or your users the content you or they requested from the right caching server. I hope this helps. I'm sure somebody who knows more about CDNs (ours or others) will jump in and correct whatever I've gotten wrong. -Steve On Thu, 25 Oct 2001, Christopher Wolff wrote: > > I truely enjoyed the wide range of reponses to my Digital Island post. Everything from DI is perfectly justified to 'tell DI to stick it' haha. > > I certainly do not run the largest ISP, nor the smallest, but my small company is managing customer connectivity on both coasts of the continental US. My customers know me as the one that cares about their network infrastructure and can answer most questions quickly. I enjoy offering personal service. > > I also take pride in managing my network well. I know, for the most part, what kinds of traffic are passing through my network. This helps me take a proactive stance to issues before they become my customers' business impediments. > > Therefore, I have to respectfully take exception to the opinion of "Welcome to the Internet, there's nothing you can do, just don't worry about 441 packets." > > I partner with companies that share my view of network management. Recently I had an issue with a customer that was claiming poor throughput. Global crossing did everything in their power to analyze their network, my network, and my customers server farm. Although this turned out to be a TCP/IP tuning issue on the particular host, Global Crossing did not charge me a premium for investigating this issue. > > Throughout this resolution, Global Crossing earned my respect and confidence that I am *partnered* with a vendor instead of just buying bandwidth from them. > > Just my $0.02, > > Christopher J. Wolff, VP, CTO > Broadband Laboratories > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Steve Gibbard [email protected]
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