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Re: Nuclear survivability (was: Cogent/Level 3 depeering)

  • From: Joel Jaeggli
  • Date: Thu Oct 06 17:40:06 2005 
On Thu, 6 Oct 2005, Steven Champeon wrote:


on Thu, Oct 06, 2005 at 03:25:54PM -0500, John Kristoff wrote:

On Thu, 6 Oct 2005 11:54:34 +0100
[email protected] wrote:


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>

I believe the mental->mythical sequence went something like:

- some people (Paul Baran among them) were interested in ways to build
  communications networks that could survive lots of damage, and came
  up with the idea of distributed networks that could route through
  multiple redundant nodes
Read the paper here:

http://www.rand.org/publications/RM/baran.list.html

Redundant is probably the wrong word, failure-tolerant is probably more accurate.


- the US was in a cold war and nuclear arms race

- a nuclear attack could inflict lots of damage to communications
  networks

- the Internet was eventually, to some extent, built as a distributed
  network with routing through multiple redundant nodes (if nothing
  else, the protocols that ran it were capable of such)


- the Internet was therefore built to survive a nuclear attack
Roughly modeled after something designed to continue to route packets following the loss of a few nodes.

QED, HTH, HAND



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Joel Jaeggli  	       Unix Consulting 	       [email protected]
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