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Blackout Shows Net's Fragility
It doesn't come easy wrote to mention a ZDNet article discussing a recent outage between Level 3 Communications and Cogent Communication. A business feud inadvertently highlighted the fragility of the Internet's skeleton. From the article: "In theory, this kind of blackout is precisely the kind of problem the Internet was designed to withstand. The complicated, interlocking nature of networks means that data traffic is supposed to be able to find an alternate route to its destination, even if a critical link is broken. In practice, obscure contract disputes between the big network companies can make all these redundancies moot. At issue is a type of network connection called 'peering.' Most of the biggest network companies, such as AT&T, Sprint and MCI, as well as companies including Cogent and Level 3, strike "peering agreements" in which they agree to establish direct connections between their networks. "
In theory, this kind of blackout is precisely the kind of problem the Internet was designed to withstand
Riiight...just like the Internet keeps everyone anonymous.
The Internet will IMVHO always be quite fragile. While the design lends itself to robustness the reality is that there is only money for a few very big connections and therefore a disaster that affects one of these connections is going to cause wide spread outages.
Take, for instance, the connections running between Europe and America. I bet most of them run in almost exactly the same place on the sea bed because it's the cheapest / shortest path to take. A fairly localized geological disaster (at least in geological terms) could cut all the cables at once; or at least enough to make to difference.
If we wanted the network to be robust we would need to run cables up over the north pole and round the equator and probably stick in some satelite links as well. There just isn't money for that. People are willing to accept the risk that it might fail in extreme situations.
FWIW I think the problem is worse on the global scale than the country scale. I imagine most developed countries probably have enough redundancy in their own country. It's the interconnects between countries that are probably the biggest problem.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
If you make the Top Tiers a government-controlled service, expect long term problems like censorship, taxation and regulations on sub-level tiers.
Neither company involved in this dispute wants to do t is. They need to work it out, or other companies will find a solution and take the customers.
If you're desperate to provide data to multiple top tiers, pay for a host that is connected to multiple backbones.
There is zero need to mandate anything. Let the free market provide and we'll be safer in the long run. Let government provide and we'll see a slowly creeping tyranny online.
Privatization strikes again. You put the infrastructure into the hands of a few powerful people and this is what you will get. Those big power outages happened for the same reason. We aren't holding those in charge responsible. There is no redundancy when there is only one provider. They can cut you off and what are you going to do? Only community services and coops can provide the necessary robustness. But it seems to be more convenient to just hand it over to corporate pirates.
What?
Ah I see so by giving control over to the UN it will magically put in place all the hardware, software and correctly configure the web to never fail? Hopefully this statement was made to be joke because otherwise it doesn't make a bit of sense. I picture the web now as a 100,000 foot long giant slinky that someone has twisted into oblivion. I don't even know if the web can be fixed at this point...
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
If Level3 didn't want to peer anymore with Cogent. That's understandable, it wasn't an even exchange of traffic anymore. They could have done the right thing and simply stopped the peering. Insted, they have decided to be vendictive and filter any traffic to/from Cogent's IP range, even if the traffic is coming through some other ISPs network that Level3 still has peering or paid relationships with.
One again, the internet routers are perfectly able to find routes, Level3 is just deliberately trashing the packets before they get there. The Internet isn't 'unstable'. Any ISP can filter packets entering or leaving their network, and Level3 has decided to do so in an bad way. This just means Level3 customers should be pissed. This is nothing for anyone to get their panties in a bunch over except Cogent and Level3 customers, who's ISPs are being dicks.
I know there's been talk of wireless mesh networks where everybody is both an end point and a router. This would work in populated areas
This would work in populated areas in theory. In practice, though, 95% of the bandwidth in any given system gets eaten up by 5% of the users unless there is heavy regulation. Actually, we pretty much need the big internet companies in order to get a particular level of QoS.
Like I said, all it takes is one in fifty who won't play nice to ruin it for everybody else. I'd be willing to bet that 1 in 50 people is a sociopathic jerk - probably even more. Ultimately, we need something to keep the sociopaths from going nuts. "Power to the people," like the anarchy that is mesh networking won't work.
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Damage: Level3 won't accept Cogent traffic. Horrible hack: tunnel BGP traffic to Level3 customer who masquerades requests as local traffic.
You don't need to masquerade anything, if you're connected to Level3 and Cogent, just configure your router to advertise your route to the Level3 network on the Cogent side and vice-versa.
Then watch your router melt under the hundreds of gigabits of traffic -- that you'll have to pay for both ways. Congratulation, you're the new peering agreement between Level3 and Cogent!
The pitch is even better now. If you are an L3 transit customer, Cogent will give you free service for a year. For L3's current customers this solves the immediate problem, and they wind up multi-homed, so they don't get bitten by this in the future.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
HOW PATHETIC! Two major ISP are willing to piss off thousands of people just because they've thrown their toys out of the pram. Back at school they'd get told to shut up and get along, now it'll become a legal action. GET A FUCKING GRIP!!! I thought the world was too sensible for this kind of thing. I was wrong.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
Sure, they have the connections, but routing extra traffic through those peering links will probably only cascade this problem. The intermediate providers will see a jump in trafic coming through from L3 and Cogent, and they will have to consider how to recoup the costs that that is imposing on them.
It's a web, and when one strand breaks, it increases the strain on the other strands.