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Internet 2 Crawls Forward
JimBoBereLLa writes sent us yet another story about that wondrous beast known as Internet2. Talks about specs and bandwidth and applications currently being used to test the new network (which currently connects 180 points, of which my sofa tragically is not one of them). A fairly fluffy piece, but at least it's nice to know that it's getting somewhere every few months.
Uh.... I think I'm missing something here. First, Internet2 is (was?) a research-only network. It's not (supposed to be) a place for pr0n and other commercial use.
You speak of standards. The Internet, as we see it, is just a collection of heterogenious networks in a homogeneous naming space (well, mostly--a discussion of NAT is beyond the scope of this comment). You want to move to I2? Fine. Go enroll as student or faculty at one of 180 research institutions. Just don't go there for much Quake use :-)
You also take a look at kermit. Kermit was not an Internet protocol per se, but was a terminal-terminal download protocol that assumes unreliable network streams. Yes, that means certain instances of kermit-over-IP existed, but it doesn't mean that kermit was necessarily an Internet application-level protocol, where most transfer tools assume a TCP-level (or equivalent) functionality, leaving error detection and correction (among other things) to the lower-level protocols, and it dealing more with the application-specific information.
As for benchmarking /. code, I really don't see the difference of its code running on I2, Internet, or my home LAN; provided that the host is mated to a decent backbone, its performance would be more dependent upon load/system configuration than the underlying network itself. I2, with its much smaller user base and a similar backbone, consequently has much lower load, so it should perform better.
Besides, if you wanted to compare/contrast I2 to Internet, you'd probably do a network traffic analysis (peak bandwith, peak latency, multiplexing capabilities, etc), which would be a function of the routers than anything else.
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main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
After reading through the previous posts it doesn't seem to me that anyone has addressed the scariest part about I2, "quality of service". What this actually means is that within the header of an IPv6 packet is a priority byte. Based on the value of this byte will determine whether that packet sits waiting at the router, or rushes on through. From the article...
I-2 is researching what it calls "quality of service," some way to guarantee seamless delivery of priority transmissions. A collaborative medical procedure, for instance, should not be interrupted by e-mail traffic. One thought is to create a premium service, where critical data would be tagged so that routers would pass it through first, much the way railroads clear the tracks for express trains.
The way the article makes it sound, there will be a purely technical reasoning behind which packets will be given a priority. Bzzzz, wrong answer folks. What is being sold to corporate IT managers out there (based on some IPv6 seminars I've been to) is that you'll be able to buy higher priority for your packets.
Stop and really think about this. You're an ISP that can assign a different priority to packets going to and from your various customers. Are you really going to ignore the billing potential of selling higher packet priority to different folks? For that matter, as the demand goes up for higher packet priority, so does the cost.
There are some truly frightening scenarios that can come to play here with the standard as it is presently being presented. What we're really looking at here is that live medical procedure waiting at the router for a CEO's E-Mail to get through.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
Not addressed was when, if ever, will I2 be open and available to organizations and individuals outside of the 180 academic institutions?
If it is opened, there will most likely be the typical Oklahoma Land Rush of speculators and "netrepreneurs" who wish to be the Amazon, Ebay and Sanford Wallace of the "New Internet". For better of for worse, this will change the landscape of I2 as its' current users know of it today.
If it is kept closed and limited to universities it will become purely an academic entity for research, development and communication and a test bed for future technology.
The problem which might happen in the latter possibility is the private sponsors, Worldcom, Qwest, others, may eventually want to see some return for their investment translated into profitable products. If I2 does not produce marketable products or technology which can add to the companies' bottom line, there is again, a possibility that stock holders, board directors or company officers may decide to withdraw funding.
Finally, a portion of I2 is financed by taxpayer money. As with nearly every federal program, there is always the possibility of Congress cutting or eliminating funding in the future jeopardizing I2's existance. See Super Collider for further reference.
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rooooar
Oops Slashdot ate my less-than sign.
Which is, in fact, a part of the problem, but not when separated from the whole view, namely urban development as an entirety. Take a step back to Portland, to San Diego, to Toronto. All of these cities have large urban populations and busy downtown cores, with major potential for traffic...but the cities in question have alleviated the problems by favoring inmprovements to transit rather than road infrastructure. portland took things one step further, drawing on traffic calming projects in germany (they know cars). What followed was a a series of laws that eliminated free parking for company employees, and large subsidies for transit and carpooling (either monetary, or physical allowances. In all three cities, one can find car lanes that are only for use by cars with three or more passengers, or buses).
What followed was a "the establishment of an urban growth boundary adopted in 1980, middle-class neighborhoods continue to grow and thrive close to the downtown instead of engaging in a suburban exodus, while more distant, exurban communities remain undeveloped, leaving the people there in therir pastoral splendour...this contrasts sharply with cities such as Detroit where 30% of the downtown core remains empty and the only people who live there are either the very rich who inhabit 'fortress' areas which are access controlled and patrolled by private police, or the very poor who live in run down areas with a decayed infrastructure...the stabilizing (emphasis mine) middle-class having fled to the suburbs long ago." [Namir Khan, Healthy Cities Report]
The pattern is cyclical...roads --> people --> traffic --> roads --> people...you can add elements to the cycle ad infinitum, as guaranteed by the butterfly effect. Pointedly, the statement worth making is not "roads cause cars", but instead "roads do not cause less cars, only more traffic".
It's interesting to think about the middle-class as the stabilizing factor in urban development (and by extension, traffic use). If we were to categorize a hierarchy of internet users, what would be the defining parameter? In the urban case, it's clearly money...on the web, i would argue that the class system of internet usage revolves around bandwidth speed (the obvious conclusion), but rather the wealth of knowledge and information in transfer. The premium is web space, just as in cities the premium is land. The purchasing power is in the value of your information...large multinational companies constitute wealthy, gated communities with private intranet policing and limited access, whereas the 'poor' netizens spend their time chained to useless IRC events and porn surfing. in this case, the stabilizing factor happens to be people with legitimate interests in technology and even a hand in the process. The stabilizing factor is Slashdot.
IPv6 has been developed largely in public. Although you can use it with static IP addresses, based on the NIC MAC address, you don't have to use this - in fact you can assign whatever IPv6 address you feel like to an interface and use that instead (as long as it's routable).
IPv6 addresses can't be hard coded into NICs, because part of the address derives from the network provider and the site.
The result is that IPv6 can be just as anonymous as IPv4, with some reasonable setup, though by default it's possible your IP address will be quite static. No doubt privacy-enhancing tools will make it easy to randomly choose the lower part of your MAC address to get some privacy back, just as analogous tools block cookies etc.
If you must be so paranoid, why not at least learn about how IPv6 works before you start posting?
You don't know, and can't find out very reliably (at this point, anyway) what any of the three-letter gov't agencies may or may not have built into Internet2. Remember, 'Internet1' was originally ARPANet, and was build largely with federal funds and support. There's no reason to think that the second generation will have any more "backdoors" build into it than the first -- though I suppose there's no real reason that there couldn't be a good number in the current incarnation...
You assume all first posters are young... they're not.
And my gut reaction to this is that it's so arrogant about the net, it might just be a troll.
Malk-a-mite
Anyone else out there remember the "September Syndrome" when all the freshmen at college/university first got their accounts. They would test the waters and often would be quick to flame or troll. This would be quickly corrected by the existing community members and the freshmen would be put in their place. In about a month and things would calm down untill the next September. Well the net has been looking like September for the last couple of years now. Every day of every month, September. Oh well. :)
He has a point, though. It would be nice if there was some way to ensure that the people on the net respect the net. If you have to have a license for hunting, fishing, and driving, why not for I2? Admittedly, the above examples are threats to life, limb, and environment, but there's no reason we shouldn't try to protect our information sources too. If net access was seen as a privilege rather than a right...
Just a few random thoughts.
Visit the
No, but there were looser (read: no) restrictions on who can be on the network. I2 has a rather stringent policy on who can be on and who can't. Please read the FAQ :-).
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I work as a sysadmin for the Swiss Post and there are dozen of thousands of workstations (NT, Linux, BSD, MacOSXYZ, etc.) connected together on a damn' fast network.
When I have to install some software I just mount a remote disk (could be 300km far) and launch the exec from there.
One day I also made a test of burning a CD during the work hours. The data to be burnt were something like 50km far.
Believe it or not it worked. All our machines (in this office) have 100Mb Ethernet and, whenever I download some stuff, I am sure the bottleneck is the harddisc.
So, when I read about XGb/second I just wonder how much I'll have to spend on hardware (optical connection to disks, faster than light BUSes, etc.) to benefit from this powerup.
BTW, NO : I don't want Internet 2 to be the fastest ever just because Internet 1 happens to be fast enough, I just want it to be free as in Free Speech and Free Software.
(I don't mind about Free Beer but I would about Free Guinness)
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Trolling using another account since 2005.
"Indiana University music students can now hear the performances associated with their course work on computer. IU, which has the largest music school in the nation, has digitised its entire music library. "
Hehe, so it is already being used for sharing music.
Jilles
The question is, will they ever "roll it out" to beyond what it is now? I mean, sure, they use IPv6, sure, their backbones are probably an order of magnitude fatter on a per-host basis, but would "they" ever roll it out, or would the current IPv4-based Internet just migrate to IPv6 when the specs are "done", tunnelling some legacy IPv4-based traffic in a "4-bone", or doing some sort of weird IPv6-IPv4 NAT? Or will the current IPv4-based Internet plod on, NAT-ting everywhere (dear lord, I hope not)?
Then again, when I run traceroute(1) everywhere, I almost always see a 10.x.y.z somewhere :-)
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DHCP supports anonymity by sharing (admittedly limited) IP address among large numbers of people.
If the DHCP server keeps good enough logs (depending on how it is configured), then the IP address and time can be linked with the MAC address, which can then be traced back to your computer. And also, some places that use DHCP (including the college dorm where I live) have enough IPs that they can assign one *static* IP to every computer on the network.
IPv4 works... now. We don't need IPv6... unless it's advocates have a different goal, which IPv4 isn't meeting.
IPv4 works just fine, but is running out of addresses. Hence the need for IPv6. IPv6 isn't about tracking people -- it's about keeping up with a rapidly expanding Internet.
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I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
tuxedo-steve wrote: the Internet-2 network wasn't ever destined to become a public network - access would be restricted to academic bodies and such
Erm, isn't that The Grid not Internet2? Or am I talking arse? If so then what is the difference between The Grid and Internet2?
As I understood it Internet2 was a set of protocols for a new high-speed backwards-compatible internet for use by anyone would could afford to hook up, whereas The Grid was an entirely seperate new high-speed network which was strictly for accademic/millitary use.
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Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
We're getting ahead of ourselves. First, we need to restrict people's access to libraries. Currently, too many foolish, ignorant people have access to too much information. No good will come of that.
:)
We also need to license people for social interactions -- when people get together, they often exchange thoughts and ideas (many of these, no doubt, gained from the libraries!). From a careful study of history, we now know that this uncontrolled interaction usually leads to grave disaster for the ruling elite. Thus, for their own good, and ours, non-approved persons will be confined to their homes until they have proven they are capable of civilized behavior in groups.
(my apologies to Jonathon Swift
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D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
4.5 gigabytes of data.... on a 1000X Web, ...can be yours in just 15 seconds.
;-)
Crap, don't let the RIAA and MPAA hear about this.
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
How about when we created the telephone to transmit information as sound instead of transcribing it to paper (and moving many times the bandwidth of the telegraph), was that "more than we need"?
Now we're in an age of ADSL lines, cable modems and megabit satellite links. One DSL line can carry information equivalent to several voice channels, and cable modems crank at Ethernet speeds (albeit shared). It's all using existing infrastructure. When did using some of that become taking "more than we need"?
Some hundreds of millions of years ago, plants learned how to conserve water and fend off deadly solar radiation. They came out of the seas and took over the land. When did they start taking more than they needed? Hell, it was there, and there was sunlight going to waste just like there's bandwidth going to waste in just about every fiber-optic strand in the world. We're not "wasting" anything by refusing to be limited to 300 BPS modems and 20 megabyte 14-inch hard drives; if anything, we are conserving by getting more and more out of less and less. This isn't waste or selfishness, it is the exact opposite.
[emphasis added] Maybe I'd like to use a Palm to do more than track what I want to do. Maybe I want to play games on it, read books (with pictures) on it, and listen to music on it. Maybe I want to use something like a Palm (and maybe a headset) to supplement or replace my personal stereo, my pager, cell phone, GPS, bicycle trip computer, and even my laptop machine. So I do more with less mass, bulk and energy; where's this taking more than I need? And since when is the Internet "a fixed space", anyway? It's grown by orders of magnitude in the last ten years, and more orders of magnitude are in the offing. I'll take it unless you spit in it. Har. The flow of Coke is limited by the atmospheric pressure and the viscosity of the fluid (Classic will flow slower than Diet). Once you have a full vacuum on your end of the straw (possible, considering the weakness of your arguments!- The straw would explode due to the driving pressure exceeding the hoop strength of the plastic.
- If the straw were made of steel instead, the power requirements of the pump would quickly "take more than you needed" to move the water.
- Somewhere as pressures increased, the water would be delivered at boiling or hotter. The energy put in by the pump is dissipated as friction, and that heats both the water and the pipe.
Sooner or later you need a fatter pipe, QED. Arguments to the contrary... suck.--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Please, this is not Flamebait... but,
How many of you think this will really evolve as an autonomous Network not connected to Internet(1)? MS gave this a try with their MSN and failed. Isn't it better to Keep replacing old HW/cables with new gradually and 'eternaly'? After all ArpaNETs original total bandwith is said to have been 56k. Theoretically we're still using it but the bandwith has increased.... a lot.. :)
Anonyumous Howard
We're on internet2 a U rochester. [xm@jolt xm]$traceroute backbone2.syr.edu traceroute to backbone2.syr.edu (128.230.165.4), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets 1 resnet-tiernan-bbgw.utd.rochester.edu (128.151.85.250) 1.126 ms 1.10 ms 2.128 ms 2 gilbert-resnet-bbgw-if.utd.rochester.edu (128.151.4.9) 1.909 ms 2.140 ms 2.480 ms 3 annex1-to-annex5505-1.utd.rochester.edu (128.151.5.73) 106.170 ms 21.105 ms 2.76 ms 4 syru-uofr1.nysernet.net (199.109.1.57) 4.655 ms 3.446 ms 4.681 ms 5 128.230.249.2 (128.230.249.2) 6.32 ms 4.195 ms 4.222 ms 6 backbone2.syr.edu (128.230.165.4) 6.210 ms^C I get 1.2 megabits to people at other internet2 schools.
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rooooar
Internet 1 was created by government employees and academics. Only after sufficient trial was it handed over to the public "hackers" (that is, if you accept the definition of hackers as public software commanders, and not the academics who put the system together). Now, it's been almost completely taken over by big business ($850 billion total sales last year).
Internet 2 is again being created by academics in a much more open atmosphere. True, they are focusing more on broadband video and voice transfer, but nearly every protocol and standard they are using is available to the public and open-sourced (just not the hardware).
If you're an academic, this has to be. You can't be researching something and have another professor across country say "I already shelled out an algorhythm for high-speed video streaming but I... uh... don't know if I want it getting out." (Corporate secrecy may penetrate the upper layers at some institutions with grants, but most pure academics will cite the simple pride of research as key.)
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
With All the Geeks out there, might there be a way to create our own internet??? so that we did not have to deal with all the BS. I mean there is enough brain power to do it ourselves if we put our heads to it.
If we refuse to be flexible, we are in effect opting out of the game of life. The world moves on without us.
More than 30 years ago, an author by the name of Helen Leavitt argued that expanding roads led to MORE traffic, not less. The argument was fairly simple...sure, you may get a little more breathing room for a while, but that doesn't address the real problem: too many people are driving on this road. Having more space leads to, well, more people driving on the road. (Leavitt, Superhighway-Superhoax. Must reading for the next generation of civil engineers...some of the fluffier tree-hugging ones have taken the cause to heart at this site).
If you stop to think about it, it makes a lot of sense.
Now i'm going to continue my line of thought, asuming you follow with the whole "more road = more road rage" theorem. (For those of you who still aren't convinced, either you're an old-school civil engineer in which case there's no hope for you, or you're not, in which case you'll be swayed by case studies like the city of Portland. In the 60-70s, Portland was having huge traffic problems. to solve the situation, they demolished a downtown freeway.) the question is: does the same logic apply to the internet?
Obviously, with a larger backbone you're going to see both a decrease in transfer time and an increase in usage. But is the decrease a temporary effect? I have a lot of friends who have seen their broadband service deteriorate to the point where they can get their kicks faster on a free isp. I'm sure you do too. Coincidence? Hardly...
The key difference between real traffic and internet traffic is that physical space is not at a premium. In the real world, land is the bottleneck factor. On the Web, the difference between 5 lanes and 50 lanes is also real, just not in the same way it is in your suburb. What does that mean? There is a greater allowance for 'lane width' patches on the Net...this still doesn't change the fact that to solve information transfer problems, we need to come up with better ways to shift packets, with better cars if you will, rather than expanding the avenues for that data infinitely (a solution doomed to failure because there will always be more data than road. How many of you thought your X-gigabyte hard drve was enough space, only to find it filled yet again).
What are these solutions? I don't know, i'm (almost) an electrical engineer not a magician...try sifting through Jane Jacobs or Peter Calthorpe or some other engineering conceptualists for answers...it's more likely that a new wave of net design theorists will need to stpep forward and shed some light on the rampant growth, kind of like hacking through jungle foliage with a machete so we can actually aget somewhere.
-j
When you have the larger global/national carriers putting in 10Gig links (OC192) to cope with the current demands, and switch vendors building switches that can handle multiple 10Gig links as a single path (read Multi-Link PPP writ LARGE), running a backbone with some tiny little OC48s (2.5 Gig) doesn't seem all that impressive. Granted, it was the technology tester that helped us get to where we are now, but notice that I2 isn't getting the 192 links, The 'Real' Internet is.
That's just the membership policy for UCAID, not the Internet2 at large. Okay currently UCAID *is* the Internet2 at large, but I have a hard time believing that when they roll this out, they expect the entire Internet2 to consist of a single organisation.
Your wasting your time. the very people you're speaking to are 90 percent of the people that should be banned from the internet for foul language, sexual deviance and dangerous views that, in my opinion, represent a serious threat to national security.
This is another example of the global fall from grace and general neglection of Christian values.
The amount of cursing here (eg cunt fuck piss wanker shitter motherfucker etc etc) is evidence alone of the moral slide that is purpetuated by the internet.
I for one hope that access to the Internet2 will be possible via carefully vetted and monitored ISPs, where users are held fully responsible by law for what they view, say and think.
The important part is consistency. QoS is the next big thing. We don't need incredible speeds, we need a true megabit/s to anywhere. To achieve this, backbones have to be very fast, right. But the end user needs are much smaller. How may people live right on a highway? Right now, most servers deliver broadband content at barely 0.5mbit/s. And so far, Internet2 is not much faster than the truly commercial one, only less populated.
have you been defaced today?
Septem ber that never ended
<O
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Will I retire or break 10K?
Oops - you are right, i.e. most of Abilene is on IPv4 not IPv6. However, there is a 'toy backbone' of 2 core routers and 2 campus routers running IPv6, according to the Abilene IPv6 pres at http://www.ipv6forum.com/navbar/globalsummit/slide s/html/michael.lambert/sld021.htm
vBNS, the other Internet2 backbone, also has a similar 4-router configuration, though in this case the routers are all core type routers, serving Chicago, San Francisco, Maryland, etc.
Both backbone teams seem to be in 'experiment with IPv6' mode, no doubt due to the learning curve and scarcity of routers that actually support IPv6.
Actually not all of Internet2 is IPv6 - Abilene is, I think, but some of the other testing e.g. the Qbone for QoS is still on IPv4, for logistical reasons.
There's been lots of work on migration of IPv4 to IPv6 - or more correctly, coexistence, since it's quite possible IPv4 will never disappeare completely, just like DOS... The details are fairly complex, but there are various tunnelling schemes (some including automatic tunnel setup as required) as well as protocol translators that let an IPv6 domain talk to IPv4 land via (you guessed it) something like a NAT.
In time, hopefully, the IPv6 domains will get larger and larger and gateway directly to each other - the 6bone, which is an international IPv6 network, is currently a mixture of tunnels over IPv4, and some 'real' links that are native IPv6. There are even ISPs that have rolled out native IPv6 service, e.g. NTT is one that has done quite a lot in this area.
IPv6 is particularly useful to Asia and other non-US/European regions, which didn't get much IPv4 address allocation and now really need the address space. It's also important for the massive mobile Internet roll-outs that are happening over the next few years. Just as soon as Microsoft, Cisco and others start shipping IPv6 as standard (quite soon now) it will have a chance of taking over, though it will take anywhere from 5-10 years IMO.
How do we know (and ensure) that the FBI (or the NSA or Echelon or whoever) hasn't "requested" that "certain features" be built into Internet2?
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with the presidential election fast approaching, I'm surprised Al has time to tinker with I2.
Never meant half of the things I said to you. So you know, there's a half that might be true - G. Phillips
Is "replacing" the Internet a good idea? You can bet that if the Internet is going to be "completely overhauled" then they're going to "correct" the "mistakes" that were made with Internet 1 -- namely, that pesky little de-centralization "bug" that prevents Big Government and Big Business from exercising tight control over the end-user experience. Internet 2 will have wiretapping and censorship hooks installed at every router and gateway. Internet 2 will require a registered, privileged connection if you want to run a server of any type. Internet 2 will have draconian TOS that ensures that all users will be the tame sheep that Big Government and Big Business wants us to be.
Don't moderate this as 'funny' -- I'm dead serious.
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Thank you. I didn't know that IPv6 is actually in use right now
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#include <stdio.h>
int main(int O,char**a){10>4*O):10)&&main(2+O,0);}
Oh well. At least they've got the implicit return 0 rule in there :)
That begs the question (though it has also come up in other discussion of network theory and design): Where do we draw the line between reliability and performance of a network, and the privacy of its users?
In a completely anonymous system, no one can be tracked down to persecute them, whether they are a harmless /.'er or an international terrorist or script kiddie. On the other hand, a network with a unique ID for every device and individual lets spammers and kiddie porn peddlers get blocked, but also gives the gov't, or anti-abortion activists, or your carzy ex, find out who and where you are.
So, what do we do? Continue with the awkward practice of a partially anonymous network and optional, somewhat reliable authentication? Or do we move further towards one of the other ends of the spectrum?
According to an article I read a couple of years ago, the Internet-2 network wasn't ever destined to become a public network - access would be restricted to academic bodies and such, partially in order to restrict the bloating and commercialisation that happened to the existing Internet. As such, it's not really necessary for it to be connected to the Internet(1) in order for it to flourish, as an earlier comment suggested - it would flourish in its own way, quality rather than quantity.
- SMJ - (It's not just a name: it's a bad aftertaste.)
Agh! Please no more 3d banner ads or 3d pictures of your Mom's cat!!! ACK!
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